Petitions have weight providing they're coming from the right places. There's a difference between the random internet petitions that random users make, and petitions coming from bodies such as unions or regulatory bodies.
This is a petition being put forward from a well known organisation, so I would gather it actually has some weight.
They definitely exist - quite a lot of them in fact - it's just after the big migrations in 2022, the kind of people who tend to get popular on Mastodon are the more "serious" posters, as they've eclipsed the memers in popularity. (Eternal September kind of thing)
If you check out the explore and local feeds of instances such as Wet Dry World or Beige Party, you'll find the meme posters, who you can then follow.
What doesn't help either is that meme posters never use hashtags, even though they're the primary way to be discovered on Mastodon. On the other hand, people who are posting "serious" takes tend to use hashtags a lot - this also helps skew the meme posters away from people. Unfortunately, hashtags have gone completely out of vogue and just aren't used by most people.
Mastodon is implementing full text search soon though, most likely with 4.2.0 (the next version), which should hopefully make things easier.
Problem: Who is Mastodon for, and what is the goal of Mastodon?
From my perspective, the issue is that Eugen made something, a certain community and culture ended up forming (not Eugen's goal, but it is what it is), and now that a different community and culture is starting to take notice, the old community and culture wants to preserve what it always was.
However, I think Eugen wants Mastodon to be for everyone, and Mastodon doesn't exist in a vacuum, so sometimes you do have to override the opinions of those who are already there. You're hearing the voices of those already there directly, but you're not hearing the voices of the people who aren't there. (and in my opinion, they should be on Mastodon / Fediverse, we're all aware of why centralised social media is bad)
There's a lot of opinions and views on Mastodon, and while "the users" are important, if Eugen wants Mastodon to have reach, sometimes he has to do different things. An example write-up of why Eugen could be making the decisions he is currently can be seen in this blog post: https://erinkissane.com/mastodon-is-easy-and-fun-except-when-it-isnt
And lastly, my final point: Whatever Mastodon itself becomes, users and administrators are still in control, so does this really matter? With the code being open source, with the ability to federate and defederate freely, ability to turn off features easily with toggles and options, Mastodon is not being compromised. The question comes down to what the default experience should be, and the Fediverse gives people control to still keep the community and culture they want, just somewhere else.
Sounds like what you need is Floorp, it's a Firefox fork with all of this built in.
Problem is, like 80% of people are on Mastodon, and many features (quote posts being the most obvious one) require the people you're posting to to have the same interaction with the post.
Using the quote post one for an example: If Mastodon never implements quote posts, what's the point? Most people will only see you posting links and it ruins the whole interaction you're looking for, so using another piece of software isn't going to help.
In regards to people disagreeing with decisions that Mastodon makes (such as full text search like this), it's a bit more complicated. Depending on the feature as well, it's possible for the things you don't like about a feature to still affect you, even if your instance doesn't have it implemented. A LOT of people complained about universeodon.com having full text search, and there was nothing they could do about it (other than just blocking universeodon.com).
I'm personally of the opinion that Mastodon should use its success and mindshare to be a little more like what people expect to get people on decentralised services (within reason - we still want good privacy controls and anti-abuse tools), and then other platforms (or instances!) can then take it further when it comes to things like no search, no quotes, etc. for insular and private communities that people want.
Personally, I'd rather just keep it as "Infinity for Lemmy", although I can understand the concerns of people thinking it's Docile Alligator working on this (when it's not). While the "for Lemmy" part is completely unnecessary, I also think it's kind of good for searching purposes as it makes it obvious what it's for. The fact that it's called Infinity though made me realise what it was and it was quite good news honestly - if it had another name I doubt it would have been discovered/picked up quite as fast.
If you were to rename, I'd just keep it a short, related name. The Eternity suggestion is quite good, another one could be Forever or something related.
Also I personally think the icon is great - though I do wish it was darker rather than light, but that's personal preference.
Hard to say exactly what Mastodon does, but mastodon.social's privacy policy should give you some direction in how they handle data: https://mastodon.social/privacy-policy
As mastodon.social is based in Germany, they will know about GDPR and have to follow it to the letter.
As an aside, linking to comments appears to be bugged and only shows any replies to it and not the main comment, like so:
Might be worth copy/pasting the content for now, I assume it's a bug in Lemmy UI. Unfortunately hitting show context just refreshes the page.
I am suspecting this is related to issue 2030.
Yeah there is, governments too. It's not super widespread but they do have a presence.
Due to how federation and anti-viral Mastodon is though, they can't hijack trends and stuff so a lot will most likely never come.
This is actually 0.0.7 as Baz forgot to update the internal string; 0.0.8 I assume will be coming a little later. I ended up uninstalling from Izzy and getting the APK because I am impatient. 😩
Yes - but the vast majority of people are not going to be downloading forks or modified versions of software, they will always get it directly from the source.
The "default", so to speak, has a lot of power.