It seems that this might be useful to add to this pile of information:

https://meta.discourse.org/t/federation-support-for-discourse/90921

The Mastodon project put a lot of energy into a high quality plushy.

I got one for my wife last Christmas, but our 19-year-old daughter countermanded it, and has something like 15000 hours logged, while maintaining a near-perfect GPA.

So apparently it works.