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They have a pattern of trying something and seeing how far they can get. Then they’ll say it was an oversight or a joke.
Someone recently called it similar to “reconnaissance in force” by the military – you go out with an uncommitted force and learn from the kind of resistance you get so you can be more effective.
The point is “mistakes” like these are not benign, or at least should not be treated as benign, since we can’t ever really know for sure.
One thing I did recently was search mastodon for some “normal” topics like fashion and yoga, but I didn’t find much.
The nice thing about Mastodon and ActivityPub is that they’re designed for the long run, and don’t need profits to be successful. So they can have slow growth year over year and still survive and slowly build up a user base that gradually adds more and more topics to attract more people.