I've only heard of the fediverse and mastodon on HN. I can't help but think it's one of those things that ONLY has traction with HN types and that the mass of people and community that makes regular social media what it is today will never be seen over there.

Good. Currently the fediverse is a breath of fresh air compared to modern social media with all of its name calling, vapid trends and political polarization. Hopefully whatever that makes regular social media "what it is today" _will_ never be seen over there.

>Currently the fediverse is a breath of fresh air compared to modern social media with all of its name calling, vapid trends and political polarization.

My experience has been the exact opposite; in fact, the name calling and polarization (in particular polarized instances) is off the charts. This is compounded by the fact that some instances host certain porn others instances don't even want to cache, and many instances have block lists against the very permissive instances (not surprising, going by the Scott Alexander quote up thread as a testament to the kind of 'witches' in these instances).

There's some intelligent content on Fedi. Most of the content is just as vapid as regular social media, but written by a different group of people.

The internet at first only had traction by HN types, and we had the same hope for it.

I've only checked out mastodon (which is supposedly part of fediverse) but it looks like a slower version of Twitter with a tiny fraction of Twitter's userbase - most of it already doubleposting on Twitter anyway. And most sites with it i've seen look like they want to sell me some service and feel faceless and soulless. I've considered at some point setting up my own instance for my own use since from what i can understand you can configure to 'fetch' messages from other instances, but (at least at the time) the system requirements for what is essentially passing around tiny snippets of text are so high that it is ridiculous. Then i thought perhaps a desktop client would provide the same functionality but the joinmastodon site has a bunch of them without any information about what they are, who makes them, if they're safe or whatever and the sites of a couple that i checked are again that "faceless, souless, perhaps trying to sell you something or sell your data to someone" variety.

So i lost interest.

The three first clients in the joinmastodon site:

Tusky: https://github.com/tuskyapp/Tusky

Fedilab: https://framagit.org/tom79/fedilab/

SubwayTooter: https://github.com/tateisu/SubwayTooter

All of them are foss and developed by a single person or a small team.

As for the system requirements. Mastodon might be a bit heavy but you could try another server software with activitypub support.

I tried a GNUSocial site and got nothing but spammers and hackers uploading photos to my site. I ran out of disk space, and had to shut it down. Moderation of such a site with just one person is a nightmare.

That's not the case at all (thank god). Most of the posts I see on the federated timeline are LGBT-related and silly Twitter-like jokes.

Technical users seem to be the minority there, unless you choose an instance looking for them.

As they say, ‘the future is now, albeit sparsely distributed’