Mastodon has two big problems. It's not just the network effect but also educating the users on how to use a federated social network. It's easy with a technical background to overestimate how easily people will understand that, let alone care about it.

Here's mainstream news trying to get people onto Mastodon, and even this is in the "tech" section: https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/mastodon-social-media-twitter-r...

A good client shouldnt make you care

That's entirely a tech problem, rather than a people problem

Is there a service that matches my curated list of subjects as well as Reddit does?

Reddit successfully killed most if not all web forums, and reigns supreme over that. Nothing even comes close; but some twitter/discord groups might be the beginning of the end.

I don't understand either of those. With twitter there's no room for thought or nuance. It's just a basic "hot take" and that's it. Sure, Reddit is full of those, but there's some depth there too at times. I understand discord even less. When I look at it it seems like just a giant chat log. I can't easily find new insights from overnight without rewinding the whole log and parsing it all. I don't know how to pick and choose topics that interest me, it's a fire-hose of noise. I assume one can do it, but I can't figure it out.

I disagree about your view on Twitter. I'd even go as far as saying it's better than Reddit for nuance because going against the pack doesn't cause you to be downvoted into obscurity. It allows more than one view. It's great for interacting directly with the researcher that did an interesting study or the developer who released a new software.

The common issue for all of the services are when they become mainstream. It attracts bad apples. Twitter used to be and still have some great interactions just like small subreddits do, but when a post reaches /r/all or the feed of a controversial celebrity, you know it's going to be awful.

Discord is more like IRC used to be. It thrives in small communities of 30-50 people where you talk regularly and each topic has its own channel so regular chitchat doesn't drown out the interesting bits. It's more of a daily pub talk with your friends than finding a tutorial 10 years after it was written.

Yeah they’re both quite far from a forum, but people often abuse them to be something similar. Nothing close to what Reddit has (or even hacker news)

Not one that's widely used. I made something small where you only see links reposted by friends, so you can get stuff from all over the place, but only if it's filtered through a friend. Which is even more granular than Reddit's curation and also obviates the need for community moderators.

I've found discord replaces some Reddit subs on my list now.

How do you consume it? I find it's like trying to read a chat log - very hard to seperate high quality signal from noise.

That's true, I'm a fast reader and I am probably on lower volume boards than you might be thinking of.

When you come back after a day or two away do you start reading where you left off like a chat log?

For the topics that interest me I do. Some I just scroll a few new messages.

I've honestly gone to Facebook groups nowadays. I don't love the company, but it does seem to be one of the last places I can find fellow nerds of my specific niche interests.