On Tuesday 07 May 2024 18:17:41 J Leslie Turriff via tde-users wrote:
It seems floss.social may have been a poor choice for social media. It's hard to be "social" when they won't even let you sign up.
Yes, I think that the bigger an individual server gets the more problematic its "user-friendliness" becomes, perhaps because of the effort of riding herd on the large number of accounts on it. I suspect it's another instance of the idea that throwing more people at a problem doesn't necessarily help fix it. On the other hand, trying to pick out a small Mastodon server to host one's account is rather trying; there is always the chance that it will suddenly disappear, leaving one suspended in mid-air like Wiley Coyote.
Leslie
Somebody else here (E.Liddell, I believe) said that the requirements for signing up vary greatly among the servers available, which, as I said, sounds a lot like jabber/xmpp in that regard. Thus I suppose that maybe some server admins are more responsive to their users, and maybe it isn't a direct ratio between size and user-unfriendliness.
In other words, you may need to go fishing until you find the server you like. As for jabber/xmpp, I always use the server at hot.chilli.net (and they have others under the same umbrella). They allow registrations without requiring any personal information, and they have been rock-solid in terms of stability. I cannot remember having any problems with them, no server down time in my experience, etc. (I wonder, idly, whether they host for Mastodon?)
Of course, I am just drawing a comparison here. Maybe the Fediverse servers are like that, and you may find others that work for you. If I understand what others have said, you can sign up with any server, and still use that account to interact, post, upload and follow accounts on other servers (again, like jabber/xmpp).
If anybody should come up with such a Fediverse server, by the way, it seems that such information would be of interest to many people on the TDE mailing list, so please share.
I am still considering whether to take the trouble to sign up, but I want to avoid those bad experiences.
Out of all the Mastodon clients available for Devuan or Linux in general, I have so far settled on toot, as it is command-line only, operates inside a terminal. I hope that means that I can use it over the Tor network, but we'll see. Otherwise, I think I'll just find a way to rss or somehow get to read what gets posted there.
Bill