Indeed. I got to that point of signup and playing with Mastodon and stopped. What, am I supposed to go hunting for some random server that'll allow me to join? Nah. I'll take my chances with getting kicked off or banned from Twitter, thanks. If I'm sent away from Twitter, I'll just stop consuming that content entirely. Probably a waste of time anyway.
This notion of affiliating with specific servers with specific cultures is I think one of the first things that's going to go out the window as Mastodon/ActivityPub succeeds. It's not that hard to provision single-user instances, and the fabled moderation overhead issues are, as I understand from talking to operators, mostly a thing that follows from having lots of people in an instance following lots of other instances --- much less a big deal if you're personally choosing every follow on your own instance.
Think Blogger, not Twitter or Facebook.
In the meantime, there's lots of smaller servers that are taking signups. I ended up on infosec.exchange; it's been fine (thanks, infosec.exchange people!). I'll be on my own address sometime in the next month or so.
Mastodon was not made for p2p, which having a huge amoung of single-user instances basically is.
The problem with Mastodon is that it ties your main account (and yes, most people just want a single account to represent their online persona) to a single instance which might have a very silly name and a very strong and unique culture (i.e. local timeline).
The solution to this is not to self-host, because the infrastructure was not made for it. The solution would be to completely rethink the Mastodon experience, but that will never be done
I'm not sure I even follow this argument. I can stand up a single host in an hour or two. Six months from now, there will probably be 30 competing providers who can do it at the push of a button. Respectfully: why is it relevant to me what Mastodon was "made for"? I just want to follow people and post stuff. That works just fine even if literally everyone has to run their own server.
ActivityPub is like RSS and Google Reader rolled up in Twitter's UX. That's what I'm psyched for, and the part of it that I think will catch on.
It's not a dumb question! I know that there is some notion of portability from one instance to another but I haven't the slightest clue how it works under the hood. I'm just sort of counting on this working. :)
I greatly appreciate federation being available even if I never have to use it. If a future social network comes along with some kind of new innovation,and it supports ActivityPub, I'll be able to use the new network while still communicating with my old contacts.
It's an excellent choice of name! (Signed, a kiwi)
Pleroma seems interesting too, though some drama in the community there turned me off a bit. I might keep an eye on Takahe too, I hadn't come across that one. Cheers!
