Yup. I loved Mastodon when it was niche. Then people wanted out of Twitter when Musk bought it. A lot turned up on my Mastodon and it turned to shit fast - they did not know how to communicate normally. It was all junk postings for likes, as if they could game algorithms to be popular and then monetise it. They did not know how to just share stuff for its own sake instead of as a product. I still have my Mastodon account but I never use it. Now Bluesky is drawing these people, maybe Mastodon is pleasant again - it is like living in a tourism hotspot, during tourist season life is shit but its great in the off-season.

Capitalism is the problem, not social media per se. And when capitalism infects stuff, I move on. That is not a new problem. Every innovation in modernity gets appropriated by capitalism (capitalists even claim that capitalism invented it but often they do not invent, they only commercially exploit something and conflate 'marketing a product' with 'inventing a technology'). To stop this appropriation, you need laws and regulations, and enforcement to see the rules are kept. That means governments pushing back on predatory capitalism. EU is starting to do this. UK is not. Not sure about other countries around globe. It feels like governments are decades overdue in defending society from these parasites but better late than never?