To be fair, saying "overheard an argument at the pub" wouldn't imply that theres but a single pub in the world.

Nah your pub is like saying "overheard online"

Maybe it is, maybe it isn't, not really something I spend much time thinking about. I'm on a ton of different social media because I run a business and need to be where people are discussing my work.

Unpopular opinion, but Mastodon is part of the problem as much as Twitter or Facebook, unfortunately.

It's just another riff at something toxic, with the difference it's open source.

As much as I'd like to endorse the decentralization model of Mastodon, it's annoying that I'm constantly shown Mastodon messages from new, often very suspicious looking domains that then want me to enable JavaScript yet again in order to run the same damn Mastodon app.

This problem is not inherent to the task. Nitter instances can do almost everything without JS.