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To a certain extent, I kind of already switched a long time ago, when I also began trying other platforms such as Sharkey (the instance I’m posting from).

But the way federation works, it requires that a profile must be discovered in order to be followed. Even though Alice at Sharkey can follow Bob at Mastodon without needing to create a Mastodon, discovering Bob relies on Mastodon tools, so if the Mastodon admins turned off/limited the search, live feed, profile directory and/or other potential discovery mechanisms, the only way Alice could find and follow Bob would be by knowing Bob from somewhere else, be it from a common friend/fan (recommendation) or if Bob links to his profile from other instance/platform.

And Mastodon.social is, by far, the largest Fediverse instance. It’s where accounts are, pulled by the “Network Effect” (newcomers are likely to sign up for Mastodon.social than, say, calckey.world). I may use Sharkey now, or whatever other instance-platform combination, but I must subscribe to a Mastodon profile shall I want to follow their content from here, and this requires me to know said profile’s existence before I can follow them. If I don’t know their existence beforehand, I won’t be able to follow them.

Live feed is an almost “unfiltered” (insofar it can be any topic/human field of knowledge in any language, akin to the Wikipedia’s “Random Article” feature but unrestricted to a specific language) stream of content that pops up as soon as it’s published, a broadcast of existences. One of the things I really love is randomness, and Live Feed used to have it: I can see Turkish news articles (nothing I could understand because I don’t speak Turkish, but it’s cool trying to read it nevertheless) popping up next to Japanese-written (idem) microblogging about food, and automated profiles monitoring some random mischievous cat who leaves and enters some living room, and some public CCTV bot profile posting weather information for a random bridge.

Notice how it’s highly diverse. And chaotic. Sometimes unpleasant things pop up too, as part of the very nature of randomness: then erotica pop up too, sometimes Vietnamese advertisement for machinery, crypto bots, scams, etc. All I need to do is to simply mute them, then they stop appearing and the randomness gets shaped to my interests, akin to a Weasel program (“methinks it’s a weasel”).

I discovered artists and arts this way. Many artistic pictures and aesthetic photos I saved were found through live feed. I discovered an profile who posts things about religious archaeology. I even experienced spiritual gnosis through synchronicity.

All those profiles and content are hosted at Mastodon.social, so finding them depends on its discovery features. And that’s the point: they just disabled this feature this week. Silently. I saw nobody talking about this other than me/this thread, maybe I’m one of the few who used to use said feature.