I'm exactly in the target demographic that desperately wants a a return to the old, decentralized, protocol-based internet. We need working alternatives to Twitter to prevent a single mentally unstable billionaire from having this kind of power.
But everything about Mastodon seems badly designed and engineered. The focus on "servers" seems technologically anachronistic, but worse, fragments the community and creates (IMO) unacceptable privacy concerns. Self-hosting requires unnecessary hoops, loses some community functionality, and runs into the risk of "defederation", which only exacerbates the problem of servers being overly important. If you do decide to go with one of the existing servers, and hadn't been there early enough to get into one of those run by the foundation, you're basically required to trust your online identity and private message secrecy to an anonymous activist admin with a kitty avatar.
Why Twitter should feel threatened by this clusterfuck at all is a mystery to me.
But everything about Mastodon seems badly designed and engineered. The focus on "servers" seems technologically anachronistic, but worse, fragments the community and creates (IMO) unacceptable privacy concerns. Self-hosting requires unnecessary hoops, loses some community functionality, and runs into the risk of "defederation", which only exacerbates the problem of servers being overly important. If you do decide to go with one of the existing servers, and hadn't been there early enough to get into one of those run by the foundation, you're basically required to trust your online identity and private message secrecy to an anonymous activist admin with a kitty avatar.
Why Twitter should feel threatened by this clusterfuck at all is a mystery to me.