I have sprinted without this being an issue so color me very confused.

Do you wear very loose fitting clothes by any chance?

Because the Mastodon community did the same thing we do every time there is a chance to get people away from corporations (e.g. Linux vs Windows).

People were looking for an alternative. The general consensus was it was hard to really grok federation. So, of course, The Community insisted on explaining federation and why it was good while basically only commenting on the instances that had closed applications. It was the equivalent of insisting someone who wanted to try Linux for gaming NEEDS to use arch and only needs to know twenty command line operations to get up and running.

So… everyone instead just went to Bluesky and Threads where sign-up links were provided rather than directory links and manifestos.

And… I am perfectly happy with that. Lemmy has a LOT of issues where so much of the community is talking about their ex-girlfriend (reddit) all the time and we basically get constant content and engagement farming that makes no fucking sense considering the userbase.

Whereas Mastodon actually IS a really good community that feels very different from twitter/bluesky/threads. It isn’t for everyone but I very regularly have genuinely good conversations with people in the town hall/microblog format. Whereas… I am not sure if I have ever had even a meaningful conversation on lemmy (whereas I’ve probably had maybe ten on reddit over the years?).

Generally speaking, all the major instances are federated with all the other major instances.

The differences are the super tiny instances (which are generally effectively zero traffic) and the controversial instances (mostly tankies). Said controversial instances don’t want to advertise that nobody can stand them and the rest of the instances don’t want to deal with the bullshit from bringing it up again.

I think it would be a nice novelty to visualize this. But I don’t think there would be much actionable information coming out of it and , because this is The Internet, it will likely lead to harassment and brigading.