Great to see so much development @ivan !
I have a qustion for a specific use case (could also ask this somewhere else, but why not here):
Say, I set up a rather local-focused bonfire instance, for example, inviting all people from my small village to have an account. I would like to be able to:
1) Post my opinion about, say, synthesizers to be read by people from all known instances. (and of course let all villager post about whatever they find interesting)
2) Allow villagers to post stuff about our village that is only visible for people in the village. For example, I could invite people for helping organizing a cleanup day in the village hall. If I understand correctly, this would be done by setting the boundary to local on my village instance.
3) On my instance, I would like to offer all accounts a default custom feed that only shows local stuff (as posted under point 2). Most villagers don't care about my opinion about synthesizers, they just wanna see what's going on in the village. (so, that is different from the current default "local" feed)
I would really love it when this third option would be possible. The literal example given here would be a serious use case, but I can think of many more.
Groups is what is missing from Mastodon. Real Groups that is. Where posts inside a group stay inside a group. You join or leave the group if you are not interested in that topic. Same as Matrix Rooms or Telgram groups. Currently Mastodon is just a stream of announcements and no real social connection. Individual threads are OK. But you'll never find that thread again after a few days.
Groups mean people can post in detail on that topic without woryying it'll bore their followers. People have multiple different topics that need not overlap.
Groups make a social connection. You'll get to know people.