That's right, there's no debate, except on the rarest of occasions. It's actually an odd feeling whenever some discussion with divergent opinions ends amicably.
In my experience, genuine "clashing of views" with amicable discussions happens pretty frequently on Mastodon. It's pretty astonishing to see sometimes, because it's so unusual for the past X years in online social spaces. Like, potentially-multi-day-threads of max-character-count messages discussing topics that people fundamentally disagree on but are trying to hash out each others' perspectives and "get somewhere" with it. Very interesting, and great to read. Sometimes it goes the other way and the people talk past each other, but that's pretty standard lol
Those on Mastondon are a self-selected group who have opted out of Xitter and Reddit.
Any new social media platform is always better than the previous by self-selection. And then it gets popular and becomes just as bad as the previoius. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Many servers on Mastodon are also rather aggressive at blocking other "disagreeable" servers. Some even apply this by association, i.e. blocking any server that doesn't block those that they consider inappropriate.
