Mastodon, Bluesky, etc are neat - both in what they're trying to be and their technology. But ultimately these days I reject them in favor of more local socialization (again, not geographically). What this looks like is a constellation of private (or pseudo private) discord communities. If I make friends in one, I often get invited to another. I recognize the merit in broader social forums like Mastodon, but it is not worth the drawbacks to me.

As an aside, I'm not happy with Discord as a platform so I'm working on my own clone with some common identity stuff but with community servers run independently. That is, there are some "federated" identity providers so community servers can agree on identity across servers, then each community server runs its own thing. The trust model is based on the community server - private channels in a community server are not E2E encrypted, you must trust the server. But DMs and DM groups are E2E encrypted and use mutual community servers as relays (with a special class of relay server for people who want to DM but don't have an actual mutual server). I'm having fun with it. Now if only I could figure out why my video has such high latency (even locally!).

A large part of the problem, imo, is that people haven't used the ability to talk to the entire planet as an opportunity to broaden their horizons, but to build themselves a transnational bubble of like-minded individuals.

Once upon a time, shouting "WTF are they thinking?" into the void was kinda understandable, but these days you can literally just ask them by changing a URL. Don't even have to go to a dodgy pub in an iffy part of town.

That said, assuming bad faith is so common these days, many people assume you're lying if your stated motives don't match their preconceptions.