Mastadon depends a lot on what instance you're on. You're community is primarily your instance and non-instance users are secondary (discovery is bad outside the instance). Unlike Twitter you have to be intentional about your community.
I've been on Mastadon since before Musk said anything about buying Twitter. I never viewed it as a Twitter replacement, but I never spent much time on Twitter to begin with.
I think a lot of people came to Mastadon to look for "Twitter but not Twitter". That's never going to exist. Not in decentralized form, not otherwise.
> Mastadon depends a lot on what instance you're on. You're community is primarily your instance and non-instance users are secondary
I don't agree with this at all. Most of my following and followers are on other instances, and that seems to be true of them too, unless you happen to be on the biggest instance mastodon.social, which has a disproportionate number of total Mastodon users, but as a result also doesn't have much of a "community" is such.
New Mastodon users, especially Twitter refugees, tend to sign up for whatever instances happen to be available for signup at the time.
It's interesting that we have such different experiences. I'm on a small instance that's mostly insular. I have a good experience anytime I'm looking at local feeds, but anytime I look at the global feed or search outside the instance the results are very low quality. I follow people outside my instance, but never ones I've discovered through Mastadon.
I've been on Mastadon since before Musk said anything about buying Twitter. I never viewed it as a Twitter replacement, but I never spent much time on Twitter to begin with.
I think a lot of people came to Mastadon to look for "Twitter but not Twitter". That's never going to exist. Not in decentralized form, not otherwise.