I hear you. I'm not sure what the solution is, because Twitter also is a lot of (good!) things, but great at encouraging healthy discourse for all is not one of them.

"sorting by "new" on Reddit..."

That is what I want on Mastodon.

Also, i don't think Twitter's algorithm promotes positive discourse. I believe that it promotes engagement at almost all cost.

Additionally, I've been having much more substantive discussion on Mastodon. In fact, that's currently my only gripe with my experience with the Fediverse - a lot of genuine connections and access to interesting people, but the silliness is in lower supply than on Twitter. I know why, and i'm aware that loving hot mess is a double edged swords.

Mastodon is not a Twitter killer, but I think that it can be a Twitter alternative for some. More importantly, it is something that has value. It is not for everyone, and isn't trying to be. It is harder to understand at first, and i wish that was different. But I'm very puzzled by people who are calling it useless, and by people who don't understand why living algorithm free wouldn't be desirable for some.

...like in real life. You choose work, school, etc., along with other people who made conscious decisions to be in the same place, along with other people who maybe ended up somewhere. On bigger servers that aren't themed or organized around a particular principle, you may have a more diverse population.

That said, a lot of discourse is happening across servers - where you end up talking to people that you would not have sought out.

I appreciate that an algorithm mixes things up for me, but finding interesting new people was at best a side effect of the algorithm.

EDIT: I don't know what 'conaxious' is

Not necessarily. You can still see posts from people across other servers, but that is very dependent on you following people, who also boost (retweet) things that their followers or people they follow post. Basically your inter-server stream of posts grows based on your ability to literally network - no algorithm involved.

Beat me to it