Same. It's a bit "random" though. Maybe because the Mastodon world has generally resisted having good global search. And even though certain instances have broad topics (like sigmoid.social for AI/ML, or fosstodon.org for F/OSS) a feed tends to quickly fill up with plenty of random stuff.

With Usenet, if you join, say, comp.ai, you know that (spam aside) you're just getting AI stuff. Same for comp.linux, comp.lang.c++, or whatever. There's something to be said for the topic hierarchy there.

I see a place for both ActivityPub and Usenet, personally. Although, again, acknowledging that somebody could probably in principle build the Usenet style experience on top of ActivityPub. But as far as I know, that part doesn't exist today. If it does, somebody please let me know.

For forums over ActivityPub, there's Lemmy.

> sorted by created at desc

Interestingly, this seems to be amongst the most controversial aspects; some people _hate_ it.

Personally, I was only quite dimly aware that Twitter had an algorithm now, like a common Facebook; until Musk ruined it I generally only really used Twitter via Tweetbot, so was getting a time-based feed anyway. So Mastodon was just what I was used to anyway. But more people than I expected actually liked the Twitter algorithm, and couldn't cope with Mastodon's lack of magic ML stuff at all.

It's not really like usenet, if only because of the character limits. This really changes the nature of the discussion.

Yes, having images available within mastodon is nice - that was always clunky with usenet.

I’m on infosec.exchange, our limit is 11000 chars. That’s more than enough.

My understanding is that "typical" Mastodon/ActivityPub instances limit you to on the order of 500. Certainly true for Fosstodon.

I never used the Fediverse, but is all/most trying to be a Twitter clone?

Mastodon is like that. Then you have Kbin and Lemmy which are more Reddit-like, and Pixelfed which is supposedly similar to Instagram.