I hope you realize that this is a hilariously out-of-touch answer with respect to what most people want from a Twitter-alike.
To me it seems like the main question is the amount of friction encountered in switching accounts in clients. In more polished clients like Ivory this is just as easy as it is with Twitter.
The first two I have replicated on Mastodon. I have stopped using all the Twitter accounts, so I have now 'slimmed down'.
If you don't care about that, then _you don't have to do those things._
This gets the closest to having control over your online identity but, honestly, the ROI for self-hosting your own Mastodon server just isn't worth it. The requirements are too demanding for just a one-person (or a few more) instance.
Even with Pleroma/Akkoma/[other platform], you still have to jump through some hoops of complexity for someone new to the fediverse, let alone a Twitter refugee (even on the more tech-literate side).
Fully self-hosting anything is a big step for anyone without sysadmin experience, though managed hosting is a good intermediate option for those willing to pay for it.
I've already tried deploying Pleroma on Fly.io using a Dockerfile and successfully did it with someone's guide. I was hoping to get away with the Fly.io's free tier but it's still a lot of work to maintain for something that should be simple. With Pleroma and it's derivatives there is not even an option to reimport "backups".
Of course, it would be nice if somebody made a full-featured fediverse server that was self-contained with no dependencies, did backups through a web UI, and was generally as easy as possible for someone without expertise to self-host. Pleroma isn't designed for that. Neither is Mastodon.
Heck, I had two twitter profiles because I had two different sets of interests. This isn't uncommon.
In your parlance, each Mastodon instance is "an app". The real apps, however, many of them can log into multiple accounts and change which account you're posting from.
It also isn't what people actually want, though.
Don't like it? You just excluded yourself as part of the intended userbase: Mastodon is not for people who don't grok federated service, and Mastodon doesn't want people who can't grok federated services.
Think of understanding simple concepts like this as sort of a "you have to be this tall to ride this ride" skill check gate. Either you get it, or you don't get in.
This is a big reason why I'm excited for Bluesky and ATProto: theirs includes many more touchpoints for federation and for control of the user experience without falling into the "server federation is so point to point that the entire thing feels like an empty landscape" problem encountered by many of the folks I know (myself included) who tried Mastodon and then bailed. Bluesky right now is pretty good, and when graph systems and personal data stores are federated along with the existing feed creators (which are a really awesome feature to use even in an early form), it'll be an interesting thing to witness.
Trying to conflate that with "xorg.conf sucks" misses the fact that Twitter is basically the X here (literally and figuratively), while Mastodon is the Wayland. A lot of X-lovers spend their time shitting on Wayland in HN comments because they don't understand the problem Wayland is solving, and don't understand it successfully solved it and is becoming the default, and it just makes them angry.
Also, I don't see the point of Bluesky. If their specifications prove to be useful, then federated services will start using those protocols. Anything they can do, Mastodon can do, too.
That's not true, though. Twitter offers valuable affordances that Mastodon does not support, and I don't mean quote tweets--I mean the ability to organically encounter conversations between people, one of whom you follow and one you maybe don't, and drift in and out of interesting conversations.
(On Twitter that is largely facilitated by quote tweets; Bluesky does support quotes, but also always surfaces replies from people you follow even if you don't follow the person to whom they were replying. This "overhearing effect" is awesome and helps gradually expand your social graph and find more neat people.)
> A lot of X-lovers spend their time shitting on Wayland in HN comments because they don't understand the problem Wayland is solving, and don't understand it successfully solved it and is becoming the default, and it just makes them angry.
What I mean is that there has been a ton of Mastodon evangelization, followed by fairly predictable and understandable user problems, followed by "well just edit xorg.conf" (or in our case here, "have multiple accounts on multiple servers and juggle all that"). It's the You Don't Need That, or the This Workaround Is Fine For Me And So It Must Be For You, or the Pull Requests Accepted thing.
There is a trap in consumer-facing OSS, where the evangelists don't realize that to compete you do have to be better in terms of the things that the evangelized care about, and because they've evaluated it doesn't mean that they're ready to contribute back, and that's the vibe I still get a lot here.
> Also, I don't see the point of Bluesky. If their specifications prove to be useful, then federated services will start using those protocols.
Maybe! Mastodon could do it, but I think that they'd do it by not being recognizably what is ActivityPub today. There's a fundamental difference in how ATProto envisions the use of the (federated, run-your-own-if-you-want) Big Graph Services[0]--a vision of which accessible today, in the small, with distributed feed generators that filter down the currently extant BGS--that the point-to-point peering of ActivityPub, the "here's a giant pile of mailboxes you're all sending stuff back and forth to", just doesn't really support. Firehose and filter, not mailbox.
The "ovehearing effect" is a big differentiator and is the straw that stirs the drink for Bluesky, for me and for a lot of people. Granted, there have been attempts to do something similar with AP relays, but that still requires server-level participation and, if they moved to per-user, you could happily crush most Mastodon servers under the load of receiving AP traffic from relay sources. Also the Mastodon frontend doesn't seem to really have a good way to integrate it into your own personal timeline, and I haven't seen movement towards it happening.
[0]: https://atproto.com/blog/federation-developer-sandbox#bgs
If course there's no reason to log in, read and log out of every account, every time you read, that would be silly when most people never bother logging out of any of their accounts to begin with.
Also, it's entirely feasible to just follow people on other accounts from whatever account you're on.