Choosing host is more important than it should be. Mainly because hosts are trying to do 2 things at the same time: being identity provider and being some kind of content host in federated environment (moderation etc).
Because of this when you choosing a host, you are investing too much. Their future policy changes etc will effect you, you cannot afaik move to another host. (like moving your email)
When you give people choice, things are much harder. On other platforms we have few choices depending on what you will publish (media type mainly), but here more like topic based separation, which is making things tricky, as we are humans with many different sides.
But yes, the issue gets outsourced to the user, and you have to trust a random individual instead of an entity like twitter.
But when you self host your Mastodon, aren't you losing the benefit of local. What is the point of local if I will be alone there?
To me local timelines only make sense if the instance has a very clearly defined group with some kind of shared access, e.g, a company that has an instance for use by its employees, or a club or organization have some kind of membership. Unfortunately Mastodon's culture seems to about aggregating around instances with a very loose sense of "community" - e.g, "photographers", "open source developers", "lgbtq allies". To me this is - quite frankly - stupid. Not a day goes by on /r/mastodon where someone asks "is there an instance for X?" thinking that Mastodon instances works like subreddits.
Wow yeah, this makes a lot of sense. It's too bad nodes became associated with niche hobbies or interests.
E.g. a fraternity/sorority that hosts a node would make perfect sense for a local timeline. I guess the only issue is that these organizations aren't permanent. So people would have to migrate, which isn't a thing for twitter or facebook. I know mastodon has a feature for this specifically but I think people would still find it too confusing if people's handles kept on changing.
Will they? Isn't it the same case with email? I used my University email when I was a student. I have a different company email for different jobs? Those that needed to communicate with me because of the job, I would give them my company email. When my work at company X ended, no one expected me to still message me at raphael@x.
The same with addresses from "email providers". They change less often, but it is still possible. My first account was probably at yahoo, but when gmail came up, I migrated, started to tell people my new address and auto forwarded any message that went to the old email.
"Well", that may be a lot of work to some people. To which the answer is "the only way to have absolute stability regarding your identity is if you own it". You can buy a domain a use a managed email service, you can have a domain and have a managed activitypub service provider.
I really don't get people's confusion over federation. It's just like email.
After starting a new job, I don't care about my old job's emails, but my twitter (which is my social network) is still the same
You can. Who said otherwise? Where did you get that idea?
An account at Mastodon (or Pleroma/Misskey/Pixelfed/anything) lets you follow anyone you want. There is no restriction about server talking with each other at the protocol level. If the server is federating and its admin is not trigger-happy with federation, you are good to go.
When I first saw Mastodon and topic based servers, I was thinking "photography" hosts will federate between each other, "developers" between each other etc. If you are a photography liking developer, you will have 2 accounts, one in "photographers in SF" instance, another one "developers in SF" maybe.
What I realized was I should have been asking: Do I care about the federated timeline? Do I care if my host blocks other hosts at random? Do I care if my host allows certain things (I.e. pornography with or without a NSFW tag, or at all). Do I know who the host is and can I trust them with my private messages and to not randomly ban me?
I personally like seeing the federated timeline as I have discovered some accounts through it. But my host absolutely needs to do some filtering because some hosts will allow -anything-. I never really found much use for the local timeline.
So for me, hosting was clearly the best option. I do try to get my friends to consider joining the fediverse, and I offer hosting to them to solve this issue.
One of my goals with communick is to get rid of this idea, actually. I try to make the point that an instance does not say anything about who you are or who you should follow.
Perhaps Automattic (the current owner of Tumblr) can shoehorn the ActivityPub protocol into Tumblr and find a way to market that system to your average Joe.
Twitter and Facebook only ban the more extreme or inconvenient forms of wrongthink. Mastodon servers on the other hand often are Subreddit style echochambers.
Think Mastodon instances (hosts) as reddit subreddits.
Basically you are creating an account in not universe (reddit) but on instance (subreddit)
And this subreddit is deciding, which other subreddits you can see with your account. (fediverse)
Using your analogy:
I don't need to create an account to view a subreddit or reddit. I don't need to create an account to view federated instances.
When I publish content on any social network I am always thinking about who it is intended for. I don't post the same things on Facebook that I would on Instagram, for example.
Users have to make the same choice of what to publish with any other social media service.
Mostly topic based federation is what I am against. (When bundled with identity)
Just like before someone needs to host the "message board" and that someone needs to be relied upon.
I often see posts on fediverse related subreddits of people who are dismayed because their instance admin did something. They expect every instance to be a "Mastodon instance" and follow some sort of rules.
People need to be reminded of the internet that was. Before Facebook and Twitter started to run it for them.
It's basically twitter/microblogging* with multiple hosts, and you can see posts from other hosts. So instead of just @andrewzah, my handle becomes @andrewzah@<host-I-chose>. You could visualize twitter as @[email protected], but it's redundant as twitter is the only host. This is basically how email works, no?
The only other difference is federation, so you have two timelines instead of one: the entire** federated timeline, and the local timeline to your host. Plus the timeline of users you follow.
So unlike twitter, the user must decide what host they want to use. Or they can self-host an instance. I'm not sure if it's up to date, but https://instances.social has a wizard for this.
*: IIRC mastodon's default limit is 500 chars, and pleroma's is 2,000.
**: One exception: Hosts can block other hosts. So if you use i.e. mastodon.social, you won't see posts from users on blocked hosts unless you specifically follow them.