I think the key point being missed here is that mastodon isn't one website segregated into communities. It's a bunch of small websites each with their own comm

I think the key point being missed here is that mastodon isn't one website segregated into communities. It's a bunch of small websites each with their own community. Instead of one garbage Twitter replacement, we have thousands of individual Twitter-like websites each aimed at a particular community. There's one for any subset of interests you care to look for. The magic of mastodon is that these websites can interact with each other. If you live on the LGBT programmer instance, you can follow and talk to people on the clam science facts server, or artists on the art server. Then you also get to see all the accounts anyone on your server follows, and you discover new accounts and servers that way. If you find a new server you like better, you can just pack up and move in a few clicks. The model is closer to subreddits than it is to Twitter. Mastodon is a fundamentally different thing, and people keep having panic attacks because they want to frame it as Twitter and it doesn't fit. It's different, and you need to adjust your perspective. Once you appreciate mastodon for what it is, it's a pretty neat platform.