Isn't this kind of orthogonal to the free speech debate? There are reasons to be worried about community silos, but my point wasn't that Mastodon is perfect, i

Isn't this kind of orthogonal to the free speech debate? There are reasons to be worried about community silos, but my point wasn't that Mastodon is perfect, it was that it's more resistant to censorship than Twitter is (particularly government censorship). Having large community spaces where everyone interacts might be a worthy goal, but those spaces are often going to require a larger degree of moderation and policing to stay civil. It's a tradeoff that (as far as I can tell) Musk doesn't seem to advocate for -- his policy seems to be that people should block/mute whatever they disagree with, and the platform shouldn't make that decision for them. If that's someone's approach to free speech and they want individual or small-group control rather than platform-wide standards, then Mastodon is a pretty interesting implementation of that idea. Compare this with something like HN -- there's one feed for everyone and limited blocking tools. That forces everyone to interact with each other, but also means that HN mods and users are both a lot more involved in debating what stories are allowed and how discourse is conducted, and those decisions impact more of the community when they're made.