Yes, if you know about that community. However, by browsing the all feeds of multiple instances, you come across communities you weren’t aware of and can subscribe to on any of the instances you have an account on. Assuming, of course, they all federate.

I think it’s more that not every comment gets upvoted after there is quite a few.

Early comments get voted on by merit. Once there is a few comments that have sufficient upvotes and replies, they become their own ecosystem.

If I’m in the comments of a popular post, I might upvote the first few top level comments I see as all make a good point. The fifth might make the best point and deserve to be higher, but alas, it only gets one upvote. By the time I get to the sixth, it’s just saying the same thing differently, no upvote needed. Seventh is interesting, so upvote, but it’s getting boring now. I don’t read further comments.

Other people stop at comment 10. Others stop at 4. So the first few get magnified, the rest struggle for the same level of attention and eyeballs. But it’s not a competition. So if the discussion is good, who cares. The 10th discussion might be the best because all the people with short attention spans, like me, aren’t there.

It’s not that it matters. It’s that if an acronym is new, it makes sense to clarify its meaning until it’s clear to all.

As an Australian, not an American, we drive long distances too. We express in km/h and km, not mph and miles. Due to high risks of sleeping on long straight empty roads, rest breaks are taken seriously here. I’d consider a 10 hour drive as door to door including minimal breaks. It would be foolhardy to drive without breaks. However, if I was describing the distance without breaks, I’d say that. If I was taking longer breaks, I’d say it too, for clarity.

My in laws live near the border of the next state. It’s a 6 hour drive without stopping. I’d describe it as a 7 hour drive, door to door. We have done it in 9 hours with stops in playgrounds for the kids. If I was describing that I’d still describe it as a 7 hour drive that we took extra breaks, so it took 9.

Why would they face any legal consequences any more than any other social media? The platform would not be liable for the content of its users. Obviously, they are responsible to remove illegal content, like child porn.

Why risk the bad PR of being on meta when you can be on your own instance that any other instance can access.

It’s like email. People don’t hold Google responsible if someone emails them with profanity.

I expect there will be sanitised versions and free for all versions. Moderation will differentiate but it may be that it’s send regulated, like porn on NSFW instances.

One thing I’ve noticed is that I’ve blocked the NSFW instance from my feed and any comments from there are blocked too. So users from instances with a lot of NSFW content may find they have less engagement. L it may be that more regulated instances have less freedom of speech but more people to listen.

Likely the realiry will be somewhere in the middle.

Yes, it will fracture, but hopefully at the fringes, as you mentioned. So thsie with extreme views find it difficult to get traction due to lack of users or lack of places to post.

It should mean that we don’t get brigading from communities. You can just block them. It should.nean that there are safer communities but they miss out on some content.

At the moment, the only large communities are general. That may change over time. I do hope that companies start their own instances. Not to control the narrative, but to be their official communication. I don’t want commercial users using the community instances.

Again, then, they can be blocked but also, they can be verified.

I don’t use mastodon. Do users need to reciprocate? So if I followed you and you moved server would I still get a notification, or only if you follow me?

Can anyone follow you, so does the notification let you know that it’s a change, rather than a new follower.

Perhaps a notification when it occurs, so you could unsubscribe if you wish.

If you wanted to participate in the discussion with a less abrasive nature, you could share that story from your mother’s perspeyand how it became your own personal culture.

However, I would consider it not to be your culture, but a family tradition. Your culture is more rooted in community than just your own family in my opinion.