@FailForward probably what I am doing would be better called mini-blogging (more than Twitter, less than a blog). When called this way, I took a look at services which do that (e.g., Tumblr) and the usage pattern fits

Thats actually what im doing. In fact i have a widget on my main blog that has my mastodon account on the sidebar with my 10 most recent posts and it says "Microblog" there. I originally started this as a way to keep my blog active even when i dont have time to write full articles. However, of course, it turned into a space I love to interact in instead. I personally have come more to love the fact that we have people who can have really huge fundamental ideological differences (which may include you and me) but can still have respectful caring conversations and shake hands and have a drink after. Thats the real value of QOTO to me now that I've been doing this a while.

> timelines are somewhat distracting, but I’ll try to use this in a somewhat introvert mode anyway

They are, but luckily I added a lot of unique tools other instances dont have to get around that.

For starters you can of course (and I personally do) kill the federated timeline all together, its mostly noise.

But more importantly what you can do is create a custom timeline instead of using the local or home and pick and choose what you want in it, and in that regard QOTO has some real special features you wont find elsewhere. For example you can add the local timeline of another instance as a timeline in your own feed or integrate it into a custom timeline with other local feeds. This lets you interact with themed servers or other instances you might otherwise have considered joining but without needing multiple accounts and with all the feature benefits we have here.

You can also filter by hashtag in both a white-list or black-list mode or even add individual sets of users to timelines.. and even add keyword filtering (not hashtags but actual words)...

some of this is in vanilla mastodon, a lot of it isnt and it makes timeline management way more powerful IMO.

> interactions are not a bad part of the experience, but need to be managed - can be easily distracting

What sort of interactions are you talking about and what sort of managing would you envision needing to do?

> lots of strange stuff fly around, but can be filtered out when needed

Yes part of that is us being an instance that federates with almost all other instances, it means you see a lot of the low-quality or offensive stuff too. Its a trade off, you get the freedom to see the content you want without someone dictating it to you, but that means its on you to filter out the content and put in that work.

The good part is mastodon makes this much easier than something like twitter due to the nature of instances. There are only a few instances that deal in anything too offensive or that might need filtering (for example porn), and since an account can block whole instances it is a great way to empower users. You just personally block by instance the half dozen or so servers that deal in porn or nudity and you've got a clean federated feed.

With that said I've been thinking a lot about how to make this easier for users since I feel some of the advantage of a more moderated instance is lost and puts more work and burden on the user, but i also dont want to take away their freedom to see what they want. I have been considering finding a way to add curated lists of servers, i guess you can call them blocklists but id rather think of them as cataloging.. basically there would be some sort of shared public list of all servers with porn, another list for ones with lolicon, another list for servers that are LGBT+ oriented, another for conservative oriented servers, another for liberal ones.. what have you... then users can just pick and choose which lists they want to either blacklist or white list or even pull those lists into timelines like i mentioned earlier. This way the user doesnt have to put in the effort searching for all this on their own.

> the images people post are a throwback into 90’s when we were sending this via e-mail (I still have a couple of GBs in my mailbox archive just funny pics and powerpoint slidedecks full of one-off jokes). Since I left this subculture, I never thought it still clogs the Intertubes elsewhere. Still fun, but I could do without.

What sort of images are we talking about here. I cant really imagine what this may mean that is specific to the 90s... Some sort of memes or something?

> tooling: Tusky proved useful, toot is good too, web interface a bit overwhelming and distracting

The problem is that Tusky doesnt provide most of the unique features mastodon has, so its a trade off. I use tusky but find it far too limiting and I really dont like post on my phone anyway, too slow to type and too annoying to correct.

As for the web being too overwhelming, have you perhaps tried the Simple UI, it cuts it all down to a single timeline and might be what your after? There are also alternative front ends that you might find useful in this regard as they simplify a lot of the frontend. For example there is a front end that makes mastodon look identical to twitter, almost like a clone, but still mastodon/QOTO

> still need to work out how to deal with hashtags - probably will ignore

Hash tags are mostly special in mastodon/QOTO because of their searchability. Typically you can only search for toots you have been tagged in or wrote yourself, which really limits the searches ability to find topics your interested in (this was done as a safety feature in vanilla mastodon since some people are very anti-search). Hash tags where the answer to that, hash tags are a way of a user saying "this can be publicly searchable by this hashtag", so it is the only effective way to use the search to find new content you werent already exposed to. In that sense it has real usefulness and probably best they arent ignored.

They also help not just for your searches but for others, remember that. so tagging your posts with hash tags really helps if you want your posts to be discoverable by others who are searching for a particular topic.