I sit (and eat) at bars all the time and sometimes people will ask me what I'm reading and strike up a conversation or sometimes I can't help but overhear a bit

I sit (and eat) at bars all the time and sometimes people will ask me what I'm reading and strike up a conversation or sometimes I can't help but overhear a bit and ask if I can join the conversation. Sometimes you go to bars or restaurants to meet new friends, have interesting conversation, be a bit more visible in public. You also try to take "no" for an answer and butt out of any conversation that doesn't want you. All of that applies to Mastodon, whether or not it ever applied to Twitter and Twitter is a very different beast (as an "old timer" on Twitter, I personally preferred when "bar politeness" was much more common than the engagement obsessed public stage it became and wanted to be, and there was a period early on where it felt common). Mastodon is far more follower-focused. Most conversations are assumed to be among followers/mutuals, even on the so-called "public feeds". Most of the so-called "public feeds" are scattershot across instances and only the instances of posting members of a conversation and maybe a subset of their the followers often truly have accurate views. The "distance to the next bar stool" (much less the "next table") on Mastodon is always further than it ever was on Twitter. A lot of people (including myself) like that about Mastodon. (I certainly left Twitter because I thought all the tables were far too close together in 2016 and that was starting to feel claustrophobic, to bend the analogy towards breaking.) On top of that, it's not just good etiquette on Mastodon. Many instances have, for instance, strict robots.txt files that make an even clearer distinction that the "next table distance" entirely excludes crawlers and search engines and archivist bots, and is just for only maybe "the person sipping a drink at the next bar stool over". Many instances have defederation policies designed to maintain "proper table distance" with what they perceive to be bad actors. That's relevant here of course because we're talking about why some instances feel it very necessary for social etiquette to keep Meta at a large "table distance" because they don't trust Meta to understand etiquette. It's somewhat circular logic, but it is entirely rational and logical in how a lot of people see Mastodon as its own sort of quirky "restaurant" and want to defend that quality of it. Which is why I like the restaurant analogy because it is a social norm, it is a social etiquette, it actively needs defending, and the problem isn't that it is a broken "analogy" that doesn't fit Mastodon, the problem is that it is a good analogy that needs to be taught to more people. I'm happy to see you on the bar stool next to me on Mastodon, pull up, take a drink, try to join a conversation, but I want you to take "no" for an answer if I don't want you in that conversation, and I want you to appreciate that I don't want you tape recording the whole conversation without asking or I will feel like punching you (even if I can't find the ssh sudo command to do that easily).