Conversation

the sub-500 active user, community focused, often (but not always) topically themed instances of the fediverse are absolutely the sweet spot in my opinion for using this as a place for getting to know people over the long term. huge noisy instances just have no local community generally because they're too dang big and they have no mechanism for sub-communities (local neighborhoods?) to grow and thrive, in no small part because we flatten interactions into weird all-or-nothing relationships in this following-follower modality so building community through instance choice and heavy use of the local timeline is the only real play.