Some comments on here discuss the Mastodon community and I hope I can chime in a bit (as someone who runs an instance with fairly large reach although not many

Some comments on here discuss the Mastodon community and I hope I can chime in a bit (as someone who runs an instance with fairly large reach although not many users). Mastodon should not be seen as a singular community, outside Mastodon there is pleroma and GNUSocial, all projects do attract different kinds of people (though GNUsocial and pleroma developers are often called out as nazis because some alt-right instances use their software, not sure why that matters). If you're looking for an instance, it's IMO important to discover the community and general feel of it. Some instances will be very strict with rules and generally boot federation with others fairly quickly, while other instances will basically federate with everyone until they break some serious rules or laws. (My instance is a mix, I have a lot of alt-right and deep-far-left instances silenced on account of excessive spam or being way to aggressive, though the instance I run is themed and politics in general are frowned upon) I think the second most important thing is to divorce the developers and software from their community. Mastodon hosts a very diverse community and a lot of niche, fringe or otherwise rather peculiar characters. A lot of them are nice, a lot aren't, most probably don't care. The federated network is what you make of it, follow people you want to follow and your timeline will likely fill with stuff that isn't too outside of your filterbubble (though there will be anti-filterbubble stuff) If you don't like mastodon itself, I severely recommend to try Pleroma instead, the developers for both projects are generally very enjoyable.