I broadly don't think it's terribly useful to dunk on other social media sites, as a rule, although they are certainly not above specific criticisms (lookin at you, twitter management)
A lot of the time, it just seems like another form of people doing weird exclusive tribalism at other people who are not in their in-group.
And like you know that for every person here who has some stereotype about mastodon culture (which, whoooo... certainly has its issues), there's someone over there who's taking an underserved shot at this site for being all web developer nerd CSS posters
But there can be sites out there that you just don't like, and other people do. It's okay to not like the thing other people do like without having to find a way to make it objectively The Bad Place With Bad People in your own mind to validate your dislike of it.
Like okay, I fucking hate tumblr's UX, it's the worst goddamn website I have ever seen and I don't understand how it has any users at all, much less enough to be one of the big successful internet social sites. I can't fucking look at it for more than a minute without getting actually angry at how bad it is! But like, I don't feel the need to bring that up at random most of the time unless that is specifically the thing we're talking about. Most of the time I'm fine just... not thinking about it and not talking about it because it would accomplish literally nothing?? Most of the time just not having an opinion on it because it literally does not matter in almost every context, is in fact the winning move.
since it's the topic du jour, my spicy take on mastodon is that the federated and local timelines are terrible misfeatures that actively place total strangers in conflict by shoving everyone into the same global forum with zero shared context or familiarity
it breaks the rule of curating your own social spaces and actively opting into reading someone's feed to be shown their posts
rather than interacting with a group of people you roughly know and have an expected set of social norms with, you're forced to imagine every possible person with every possible niche sensitivity on the global timeline who might potentially see your thing and react poorly to it
