I do agree there is less shitposting, but there's a fair amount of it nonetheless. Many other of those activist posts are toned down here... because I expect their expectations are they are largely preaching to the choir.
But just scrolling through the "toots" (again, at mastodon.social) on the main landing page I get...:
"New Yorkers yelling at nazis is fun.
Proud Boys bloodied and jailed during NYC drag queen story hour protest"
(https://mastodon.world/@StillIRise1963/110051510087068465)
"Nate Silver's brain seems to be broken. The "data guy" is literally citing a Twitter poll as if it's meaningful in a political context.
No wonder ABC News is trying to sell off FiveThirtyEight."
(https://mastodon.social/@mattsheffield/110052597467670093)
"Yet another wealthy #GOP donor turns out to be an accused pedophile, groomer, and sex trafficker. You'd almost think the party's obsessive focus on demonizing drag queens and library books was a crude act of misdirection. #USpolitics https://apnews.com/article/lazzaro-rep"
(https://newsie.social/@stevesilberman/110050892922689946 ... mastodon.social showed this to me while scrolling, but clearly this is an example of federated content)
"The neo-Nazis are creeping around, kids.
Remember, every neo-Nazi/MAGA chud/Jordan Peterson fan is a real person with feelings and gross insecurities who is also a loathsome cnt undeserving of a second of your time or attention unless you are a law enforcement agent working in counter-terrorism. Block immediately, report often.*"
(https://beige.party/@GrimmReality/110051420547135356 again, federation at work).
And the replies are, as far as I could tell while casually browsing, all reinforcing.... none at all trying to moderate the severity or civility of the points being made.
This isn't that different than what I saw I Twitter over the years, except there you saw it from many different sides of various debates. And note that my comments aren't about the issues being discussed: it's chiefly about the way they are discussed: toxically.
So I'm sorry, I don't doubt your intentions and that you really do feel more at home and welcome on Mastodon. But it's not because federation has solved the problem of Twitter-like toxicity: it hasn't, not at all. It's maybe reduced it a bit because the filters for ideology are greater (whether those filters are implemented by administrators refusing users or federating to certain servers or because Mastodon is only attracting people of a certain mindset).
- As said, I'm hosting my own instance, and I understood in the beginning that I don't just want to see the federated stuff (mostly weird sexualized anime images with way-too-young characters).
- So I manually searched through catalogs of instances listed at the website.
- I went through most of those instances, searched for users with followers and read their first couple of posts to see if they're human and interesting by any means (e.g. I happened to stumble upon a librarian instance and have learned so much about their day-to-day worklife and tools).
- Now I'm following like 900 people and have ~270 followers. That's more than enough to fill the no-algo timeline with interesting stuff.
- I'm only using the Home timeline and almost never the federated one, sometimes searching, hashtags etc.
And to be fair I've even toyed with the idea of setting up Mastodon instances (though probably using different server software) focused on strictly civil/professional discussions as part of the rule set. But of course this leaves most of the "federating" part of the equation off the table and leads me to my next observation. The only social networking that I've found that is genuinely warm and cozy, by default, are some of the Discourse communities. They are absolutely small, disconnected islands of community, but by being topical and smaller I think they avoid the toxic by default characteristics that broadly generalized communities devolve into. Of course, Discourse communities can be built around toxic content, too, but you just don't sign up: what you see is what you get. I think this more topically focused social media is really the best way to avoid the cruft compared to the open community approach.
With toxicity I was referring to the ill-fated activist groups sh*tposting things about each other and newspaper headlines crafted to produce anger-driven traffic. Something, which doesn't give me anything but depressions.