Mastodon

[dtkvictim]

And people understand the distributed nature just fine...if you can understand email or your phone providers you can understand this.

Disclaimer: I don't know what Mastodon is, nor do I care (just like Twitter).

But this claim does not help whatever you are arguing. People absolutely do not understand the distributed nature of email and phone networks, and being able to sign up with a phone or email provider is not proof that they can. The average person has learned a specific process and workflow out of necessity, but by no means understands why or how it works. Social media does not have the learning pressures of a necessity, thankfully (for now at least).

Counter.Social's software is a fork of Mastodon. It used to be federated, but the founder of Mastodon didn't like that CS blocked certain countries, so many Mastodon nodes blocked CS, so the owner (the Jester) stopped federating and went his own way. 
The Short History of CounterSocial and Mastodon from The Jester's point of view.
Wikipedia article about The Jester.
The Notorious Hacker Who’s Trying to Fix Social Media

Counter.Social seems to be good, but it is privately owned by one individual with his own idiosyncratic ideas of how things should be. I am skeptical about that.

Ah, constant incompatible forks of a decentralized technology, a tried and proven recipe for the mass adoption required by social networks.

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And be honest, are you all looking for Twitter alternatives because you truly believe it will cease to exist? Afraid of discomfort from more lax content moderation? Think it be used to promote a particular billionaire's propaganda? Something else?