I believe there is shared consensus among its users that #mastodon is overall a better social than the other ones available.
I do agree in part, but mostly I disagree.
I agree that there's no advertisement and that people is a little bit more respectful (even though most of it is just imposed mannerism).
Other than that, it remains a normal social network. I interact with other people using some short messages.
Out of all the people I interact with, I have met only one.
Since I started using mastodon I consistently use my phone more time than before, when I was using no social network.
Mastodon is interesting because it lets you create your small little community.
I personally don't live in small little communities: I juggle among different groups of friends that often don't know each other; I know isolated persons in different countries.
I am doing the same on Mastodon: I placed myself on a central instance (qoto.org), I don't interact too much with people from this instance, but I use it to stay in contact with different people from several different instances without getting dragged too much into one single instance.
Thus, the feature of creating small communities is of no particular interest to me, or it is of interest only to the extent of emulating my way to interact with people in real life: stray away from small groups of people and have several different connections in different places.
So, what about this long toot? I have no idea. I feel I am dedicating too much time to mastodon.
I have made a tool to measure how many toots I receive in my home timeline every day (http://gustavino.crucitti.xyz) and I realized I receive a lot of them. I read every toot that gets in my home timeline, I am thus spending a lot of time reading a bunch of messages from my phone, most of which come from people I don't even interact with through boosts.
The number of people I follow keeps growing, because it's easy to add someone that seems interesting for something he wrote, but it's difficult to remove people for no particular reason.
@barefootstache
I see no real advantage in this.
Even if I remove the application from my phone I will be accessing it through my computer.
Provided I read all the toots in my home timeline, the time I'll be using is more or less the same.
It may be that I spend less time writing stuff of my own, but then if I don't interact with people I don't really see a use in this.
@rastinza if the time on the phone is a factor that's bugging you, then just remove the app or make it physically hard to access the content.
I did it with Instagram that I moved the app to a second Android user account. It gives me the peace that I can still access it, though also the hurdle that it painstaking to do such. It's dropped my consumption rate from a couple hours a day to only a couple times a month. It's come to the point that I feel like I will be deleting the account completely.