I’ve been very happy on the Fediverse (mastodon) since I took the plunge a few months ago. This is what the “early” internet at its best must have felt like. Real humans, technical discussions, random finds (painting!), sorted by created at desc.
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.
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.
