"The issues with corporate social media are now well understood by large swathes of the public."

Are they? Most of the people I know are still all "gimme my feed, gimme my like buttons", and couldn't care less about anything, as long as they get to read about their parent's neighbour's cat's cousin's trip to Whereverville, or see latest pictures of our Nancy's baby boy.

I intended "large swathes" to mean "a significant enough plurality to potentially carry influence" not necessarily "overwhelmingly large majority". Maybe I'm overly optimistic.

I visited a mastodon site, and browsed for a bit with a new account. It didn't seem that different from Twitter. They are going to really need to push the envelope and take whatever advantage possible from its decentralized architecture if there is any hope of gaining mainstream traction.