> Is there a reason you can’t just create your own identity, without an instance?

It looks like Mastodon has aimed for total decentralization like email, rather than the kind of decentralization that IRC does that still keeps identities centrally managed with nick servers (e.g., how irc.libera.chat works).

Presumably, serving identity verification would be much cheaper than serving the content, so Mastodon or something like it should be able to do it scalably, while still federating separate instances for the content.

I feel like if they did that, the service would be 100x more viable… but would lose its claim to total decentralization. Idk, good luck to anyone that does a social media site cause that seems like a hard problem to solve.

I like Mastodon, i use it daily. BUT, i kinda feel it loses that claim already.

I am disincentivized to run my own instance, aka "distribute". It pushes for centralization. On multiple fronts. Why? Well for starters the protocol as i'm aware of does not efficiently federate to smaller instances compared to bigger instances.

I also fear that instances will eventually be plagued by spam / attacks from foreign small instances and will be pushed towards whitelisting federation rather than blacklisting. As the general philosophy of federation seems to match that of Email. Email.. tbh, feels like a failed technology. Yes i know, i love email and we all use it.. but it's incredibly centralized and insanely vulnerable to massive amounts of spam. The protocol almost pushes people to centralize to deal with problems that the Email protocol doesn't manage - spam. I fear Mastodon will eventually follow the same path.

I use it, but i have to ignore the protocol and my desire to decentralize.. because otherwise i just get frustrated.

That makes sense.

I was looking for an instance and they listed their server specs. They were very small servers. Would they be susceptible to simple DDOS?

It's possible, but not through Mastodon, and nobody working on anything fedi-related put much time into simplifying that for any end-users, much less non-technical end users.

Why not just use the default instance? I believe it's already filled in (or at least mentioned on the page where you enter one) if you go to their website and follow their links.

I just tried and got a message that "this is currently not possible"

It took me here:

https://joinmastodon.org/servers

Where it seems the majority of servers are overtly political and require an "application."

I do see a few where I can create an account and look generic enough to where my entire identity/first impression isn't too niche. I may give that a try.