I love Mastodon, or more accurately the fediverse in general. However, running your own instance seems like a loss in every possible way. It costs money, even if it's not much. It's work, even if it's not much. It incurs risk and liability. And it's functionally worse than being on a shared instance. Larger instances will take forever to federate with you, if they do at all. Your local timeline will be empty. You'll even have to jump through hoops to see all of the replies to posts, since the default is to show only replies from instances you've already federated with. If you often feel like you're only seeing half the conversation it's because you really are.
Lastly, the more people run their own instances, the worse everyone's experience will get. The fediverse almost entirely relies on direct communication between instances with no DHT or other mesh routing overlay, so messages are O(n^2) relative to number of instances. Caching works OK for assets but not for ActivityPub RPC, so many instances don't even implement it at all. One of the main reasons the large instances struggle so much is that these communication patterns drastically increase traffic volume and queue length, which is further exacerbated by the fact that Sidekiq (the part of Mastodon that handles those queues) is a poorly implemented tuning nightmare.
The best bet IMO is to join one of the medium-sized instances aligned around a community or vibe that you like (I'm on hachyderm BTW and it's awesome for me). Smaller ones have all of the problems I've mentioned above, while the very largest are sub-optimal in terms of both technical UX and social atmosphere. Goldilocks wins again.
Yea this has been bothering me. I have to fight to ignore the desire to run my own and just enjoy my medium-sized instance.. because any interest i get in Mastodon itself makes me want to rewrite it to run more lean and allow users to contribute costs (P2P data).
I quite enjoy Mastodon, but the whole thing feels.. incorrectly aligned with technical needs. I hope the attention it's getting leads to core implementations more aligned with the community.
Lastly, the more people run their own instances, the worse everyone's experience will get. The fediverse almost entirely relies on direct communication between instances with no DHT or other mesh routing overlay, so messages are O(n^2) relative to number of instances. Caching works OK for assets but not for ActivityPub RPC, so many instances don't even implement it at all. One of the main reasons the large instances struggle so much is that these communication patterns drastically increase traffic volume and queue length, which is further exacerbated by the fact that Sidekiq (the part of Mastodon that handles those queues) is a poorly implemented tuning nightmare.
The best bet IMO is to join one of the medium-sized instances aligned around a community or vibe that you like (I'm on hachyderm BTW and it's awesome for me). Smaller ones have all of the problems I've mentioned above, while the very largest are sub-optimal in terms of both technical UX and social atmosphere. Goldilocks wins again.
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