>>7
Hot take: Mastodon has been advertised as a ``Twitter without Nazis''. It is not better because of some artificial barrier to entry. People might have trouble selecting an instance to register on, but it is actually very user-friendly. The reason its content is better is the branding. It has been specifically designed to be unappealing to the online Nazi crowd, with emphasis on effective moderation tools that quickly shuts down their harassment campaigns. It is better because it does not have the hordes of right-wing imbeciles that do nothing but poison every single online conversation with their brain dead delusions and stupid-ass dog-whistles.
>>8
That was a mistake in hindsight though, one of the disadvantages of distributed networks is that they are harder to moderate effectively. That's why, over time more and more of the instances that were created as "Twitter without Nazis", contemplated de-federating or whitelist federation, which stood in conflict with those who were interested in a distributed network for technical reasons.