You may enjoy private Discord servers more if you're seeking online community

The influx is going to be contained on a few large servers. If you run your own instance, you can just not federate with them.

If you're not federated with them your instance is going to be a ghost town. I think it'll be hard to run an independent instance with enough activity on its own to be worth joining unless you have some external source of community/fandom to keep fresh streams of users coming in to manage churn. The largest community Discords, for example, tend to be around YouTubers, streamers, podcasters, etc. where they build the community around their content and fanbase. This was also the way the big PHP forums used to go.

People used to love the relative calm of the small PHP (and Perl) forums. For some of us in the early internet the big forums were toxic place to generally be avoided. You can have a wonderful time on a tiny instance that only federates with mostly other tiny instances and never sees the biggest instances.

Mastodon doesn't need to be Twitter where you "must" follow celebrities of any sort or streamers/podcasters/YouTubers/Influencers. People claiming that Mastodon is terrible because it isn't focused solely on massive instances with maximal "reach" are missing the point: that is a *feature* and not a bug. People have forgotten the early days of Twitter when it was mostly about following real life friends, or conference acquaintances. There's a usefulness to quieter, stiller social media. It's great to have tiny instances with tiny follow streams.

The influx has already cooled down. Growth rate for the past 4-5 days is less than half of what it was on the weekend.

Also, on Mastodon you will only see what you explicitly follow. You won't even see the rabble unless you go looking for it.

That's not true, you can see a RT federated view, or a local view, i.e. all incoming posts on your server.

Meh... It was a pain years ago and Mastodon is still a pain today.

It's not like torrents and likes of PirateBay that make downloading movies easy. It's very complex to get into the network. It's like Mastodon is trying to not let you in.

It's not too late. Joining Mastodon and tooting hasn't caught on yet.

You're definitely not too late.