microblogging is something used on a much more personal level while i think forum style social media is mostly for looking for answers and posting things you do, but microblogging social media sites are for that too. also, this is not meant to be offensive, but i think that since mastodon has been in the works for like a long...
Plebbit is a selfhosted, opensource, nonprofit social media protocol, this project was created due to wanting to give control of communication and data back to the people....
The semantic web, for example through projects like dbpedia.org, tries to make the internet machine-readable. By making it accessible in Mastodon, users could quickly access and share data from the semantic web.