Eugen Rochko is the CEO of Mastodon — the open-source decentralized competitor to Twitter. It’s where a lot of Twitter users have gone in our post-Elon Musk era.
The idea of Mastodon is that you don’t join a single platform that one company controls. You join a server, and that server can show you content from users across the entire network. If you decide you don’t like the people who run your server or you think they’re moderating content too strictly, you can leave and take your followers and social graph with you. Think about it like email, and you’ll get it. If you don’t like Gmail, you can switch to something else, but you don’t have to quit email entirely as a concept.
Instances are by no means like groups on mastodon except in the case of niche and smaller instances, which are cool but the minority on a user basis.
On mastodon, instances in general are best thought of as not useful from a user and UX perspective IMO. They simply don’t do much for the user.
That’s a valid point and I was speaking more from my personal experience as it was a niche one that drew me to mastodon and I have remained there though that experience is diminished as the instance grows. I don’t know what form these “groups” will take as I haven’t scene the code and was imaging though it sounds like it lacks interoperability with Lemmy which is big missed opportunity to say the least.