Gonna be positive about Mastodon for once. The new quoting feature works great (just don't quote flipboard.com) and i love how opening posts resolves the replies and like/boost counts to look accurate. 4.5 has been the best step up so far. The next one seems to be implementing starter packs from Bluesky, so things should get even better.

I think building a good base existing people want to stay in + new people want to come to, instead of mass audience capture and postponing important features, is the right way to go - especially for an open source project where design timelines are much longer. If it's not, i guess we'll find out later.

I'm still not huge on the quote design copying Twitter and Mastodon instead of Tumblr but that's become a minor issue now.