If you want ultimate control, it’s fully possible to self-host a Mastodon instance with yourself as the only user. I follow one person who does this, and I’m considering doing it myself, just so I won’t have to worry about the server I’m on getting overloaded or having downtime. (If my own server goes down it’s something I can fix, and it won’t get overloaded with a single user.) You can of course still follow and be followed by users on other instances, so unless you’re making a lot of use of the local timeline, it doesn’t make much difference where you’re hosted.
Edit: To be fair, if most people following you are on the same server, you’re still vulnerable to disruption if that server shuts down, or bans you for some reason. Personally I think it’s best for people to spread out across a variety of servers, even within a single subcommunity.
Came here to say this. Basically if you are worried about control in the Mastodon ecosystem (as a general issue, not specific technical flaws or vulnerabilities)... you didn't really understand it. Not an insult, its complicated, and a lot of information right now is a variation on the theme of "pick from these big existing sites/people who run mastodon so you can bail on twitter right now with very little effort"
If your worried about privacy, or control, or anything else like this. Just look at running your own self hosted Mastodon instance... Thats. The. Point. Of. Decentralised.
If you run your own instance, how do you get federated? Because isn't it the case that you have to have a federated instance in order to be followed by people on another instance?
Basically, sure you can run your own instance of Mastodon but nobody will be able to follow you until you convince a big instance like mastodon.social to federate your one person instance
My understanding is that this is the "elephant in the room" right now on federated social platforms.
I set one up as an experiment, and the "out of box experience" wasn't great - there was no equivalent of a default set of servers to pull content in from to fill the federated feed, so there's no real content discovery to get you started. That might be a design choice to avoid a centralised "default" server, fair enough - let's proceed.
Assuming you (or another user on your server) follows some users from other servers, their content then shows up on the "federated" feed. Only posts or re-shares by those users, not anything else from the federation.
From what I see, the only way to really get "seen" in the federation (since there's no other users on your own server) is to interact with and reply to others' posts (or follow them), and some may choose to follow you, since otherwise they won't know your server exists.
I am not sure that you can "federate" an instance in the way you allude to - there's an option to set up relays, but I've never really seen much written about these. It strikes me that to support a network of federated servers, there is still a need for "many-to-many" relaying, in order to help bootstrap a new server instance and get some content in from the wider world.
Maybe all of this is "by design", but I do worry with some of these platforms that we risk creating more isolated echo chambers - it feels like there's a gap at the moment in the setup which makes it more sensible to be a member of a big "centralised" popular instance (like mastodon.social), which then takes everything back to where it all began with a single centralised platform!
Isolated echo chambers may be an improvement, overall.
What's toxic about flat social spaces is that conversations gets reduced to fights between the most vocal, thoughtless, or aggressive holders of opinion X and !X. And this influences the acceptable modes of social behavior. It leaks to real life and institutions. It is corrosive.
First assumption made is that echo chambers do not exist in twitter. This seems to be based on a somewhat patronizing view of humanity that excludes the possibility of willful affinity and choice by the individual, and posits an environmental basis for opinion formation. You can easily dissuade yourself of this by picking a hot divisive topic, choose your side, and follow tweets. You will be in an echo chamber on Twitter.
So I propose we consider the two distinct goals that seem to get conflated in these discussions:
Goal 1: promote uniformity of acceptable opinion du jour.
Goal 2: prevent the poisoning of general social norms, discourse, and institutions by the ideological warfare on social networks.
The latter goal 2 appeals to my sensibilities. And post Elon acquisition, most seem to be lamenting the loss of political control over Twitter (goal 1).
Actually, most that I'm aware of are lamenting the loss of goal 2, in that they believe (correctly or not) that "poisoning of general social norms, discourse, and institutions by the ideological warfare" is exactly Elon's goal. Many aren't even worried about politics or ideology per se, so much as the stability of the platform going forward and their ability to maintain an audience.
I have yet to see an actual post on Twitter which laments any loss of political control over the platform, although it's a big platform so I could have missed it, and that can just be a bad-faith interpretation of goal 1 anyway.
I honestly don't give a fig about Elon or twitter. I was simply noting my opinion that having ideological ghettos ("siloed echo chambers") may not be such a bad thing, all things considered, since there is little pretense of actual dialogue to inform and/or reach consensus on these flat social spaces.
you don't need to do anything to "get federated". as you (and/or your users) follow folks on other servers, it just works. yes, there are disadvantages around discovery on small instances (you wont see "the firehose" of posts from people you don't follow on other servers) so... bootstrapping a network of people you follow can be difficult for sure.
Ah, okay, so as long as people go and follow your account, even if you had a one person instance, it would "just work".
I already moved my account from one mastodon instance to another (that is hosted via masto.host) and it was really seamless. So, maybe eventually I'd move to my own hosted instance.
Edit: To be fair, if most people following you are on the same server, you’re still vulnerable to disruption if that server shuts down, or bans you for some reason. Personally I think it’s best for people to spread out across a variety of servers, even within a single subcommunity.