Mastodon has done a lot to clarify their branding, and most of the tooling is a lot smoother now in terms of asking for your home server for you to log in when

Mastodon has done a lot to clarify their branding, and most of the tooling is a lot smoother now in terms of asking for your home server for you to log in when you click Follow on someone's profile. However it is fundamentally flawed for how online social media works in the modern era. Primarily Mastodon decentralizes so much, there's no possibility of discovery. You can join a server with the people you already know, or guess about whether you'll like people on a server and join one, but ultimately your ability to discover content is restricted to known accounts found outside the Fediverse, or (effectively) friends of friends. Unless you join a megalith central instance (defeating thr decentralization purpose). This lack of discoverability defeats the entire purpose of the modern social media internet age where you're able to join global communities of topics rather than just people you know. That said, BlueSky is an easy answer right now, but it's basically just old Twitter with pubic DNS for a centralized username manager. Sure, in concept you can almost host your own, but there's multiple discussions about how actually hosting your own data still isn't possible after 2 years of promises from the development team, and it would be against both their economic and technical interests to ever make it possible. Furthermore, the actual broadcasting is also still centralized (the PDS I think it's called?) so everything has to go thru them still. While I don't like it, Nostr is technologically probably a better way forward, but it needs a big funding injection (and developer interest) to setup some reference implementation relays and moderation servers.