What are you talking about? You don't need to host your own Mastodon server. You can sign up with one of the many open instances, just like gmail and hotmail let you do for e-mail.
Worth noting that running a Mastodon instance is vastly easier than setting up your own mail server. Digital Ocean even has it provisioned nowadays, so if you wanted to set one up for yourself and friends for example, it's mostly point and click.
It isn't really the same as email, because with the email it doesn't matter if you are on the same domain as other people. You can avoid this risk by hosting your own email but running your own Mastodon instance just for yourself wouldn't make much sense.
Anyone (or any organization) can self-host their own open source mastodon instance. The way it scales is the same way there are billions of email accounts - federation and an open protocol.
Mastodon gets away with just telling people to go find a server to register with, you don’t have to self host to get some reasonable level of decentralisation.
If you want to be on your own sovereign island you can host your own Mastodon instance or pay a monthly fee to one of the many Managed Mastodon providers and even use your own domain name.
It is not that much different from choosing an email provider.
You can definitely set up your own Mastodon server. I don't know how hard it is to get other servers to federate with you because I don't want to take on the overhead of running a server.
Discussions of running your own mail server make it sound like it's difficult because you have to get Microsoft and Google to accept your mail and they tend to let it go into the spam folder and not respond to you.
Will mastodon.social federate with HellsMaddy.social? Maybe. Can you use me@hellsmaddy.com? No.
Actually there are several and some are listed on the Mastodon website[1]. Look in the "So you want to run your own Mastodon server" section.
I have only heard the best about masto.host but they have closed subscriptions for now (which only speaks for them IMHO). I have personal experience with Ossrox and Weingärtner IT, they are both excellent and I can recommend them without hesitation. I have no affiliation with any of those companies except being a customer of the later two.
EDIT: The price of a small instance is less than a Twitter subscription. So, if you want your own instance - which as pros and cons - nothing is holding you back.
With regards to mastodon, there's at least one hosting service specifically for it already (https://masto.host), and people who don't know that much about the Linux command line/etc have set up their own instances using it.
Joining a Mastodon server is just as simple as signing up to Facebook. The difference is that no single Mastodon instance has centralized control over their users; you always get the option of signing up elsewhere, or using your own instance.
The sign-up process doesn't actually begin until you pick an instance and go to it directly, just like with email. It's like complaining about a website that explains what email is and gives you a list of service providers to choose from.
The email service of your choice is the "server" you've chosen. If you go directly to a mastodon instance (the "server") the sign-up process won't require you to choose a server.
You can run your own instance. It's probably not easy to do with Mastodon, but there's other server software aiming to be lightweight and easy to set up. Though I guess it will probably not be the normal way to use the fediverse in the near future.
Host your own Mastodon server then, allows you to administrate your own account. Mastodon is federated, so where your account lives has nothing to do with what accounts you reply to and follow, nor has anything to do with who replies and follows you.
Administrators have the limited scope of only their instance.
It looks like the Mastodon instance host Simon is using, masto.host, closed for new sign-ups 8 hours ago. Is there another recommended alternative? I don't think I have the energy to maintain a self-hosted Mastodon instance. I sure haven't missed running a mail server...
Mastodon is a huge mess, and these servers shut down constantly. Imagine trying to use email but the server is run by a single stranger who gives up after 2 years and you have to reset all of your account emails.
The only feasible end result is that everyone picks one large corporate server or hosts their own. Like how email works.
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