Mastodon

[danbrotherston]

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).

I'm confused...you think the average person doesn't understand that they (having a gmail account) can email someone with a hotmail account or having a rogers telephone can phone someone having a bell phone?

The point I was making is not a specific workflow but an understanding of the concept. People learned a specific workflow on twitter, they can learn the same workflow on Mastodon.

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?

"Constant incompatible forks"...it's only confusing if you look at the history. At this point Gab, Parler, and CS are all entirely separate things, nobody is confused about Twitter because Instagram exists.

"And be honest"....*I* am looking for alternatives for many reasons. Most importantly, I don't think our social spaces should be owned and controlled by an asshole billionaire, or even a robot billionaire...or even a benevolent billionaire.

Most acutely because it seems quite likely Twitter will cease to exist in it's current form in the very near future. Whether that means actual bankruptcy, complete failure of their infrastructure, further inundation with right wing extremists and hate groups through permissive policies and the CEOs own fanclub, I don't know, but there are a lot of threats right now and a backup plan is good to have.