I saw this recently when a small but vocal portion of early federated social network users complained that the "inferior" Mastodon was gaining so much traction.

I saw this recently when a small but vocal portion of early federated social network users complained that the "inferior" Mastodon was gaining so much traction. They only saw it in terms of technical features and seniority, oblivious to its main draw: a welcoming user and development community for marginalized people. Most of the early users and developers were (and continue to be) LTBTQ+ people, and the project leader (Eugen) was 100% welcoming. In a world where we don't get much that's for us, it's nice to have a thing where we're well-represented. When I tried the previous attempts at federated social networks, they seemed to match the general demographics of tech. The predominantly white, male, straight, cisgender population wasn't exactly unwelcoming, but I didn't feel comfortable talking about some topics. It wasn't any better than Twitter in that sense. And then we got content warnings and per-toot privacy levels. The possibly technically superior predecessors didn't stand a chance.