Welcome to the New Old Internet.Interaction will be lower. But the barriers to entry, even though they're minimal, combined with the parts of Twitter that have been omitted, ensure that the tone will usually be more positive. Not always, but usually.Additionally, at a corporate site, you're simply part of a personal information farm for billionaires and the U.S. government, whereas this world is decentralized and not subject to control at that level. You can speak as you wish here with fewer concerns. You can even set up your own instance [albeit at some effort] and run it as you see fit.You're interested in #boating and #maritime. It might take a while to build connections here in your areas of interest. But once you have your sea legs, associates in other venues might be interested in joining you here. Perhaps you'll run the Fediverse's primary boating and maritime instance in the end.Note, too, that the Fediverse combines different types of interaction into a single broad system. Fediverse accounts [Mastodon is only one type] can access video feeds on Peertube, artist accounts on Pixelfed, direct messages similar to email, and some types of instances have real-time chat. [Mastodon doesn't have that feature yet.]