Once more for those who are curious but not really motivated to go check it out:
The purpose of mastodon is not to be another twitter
The purpose is to be the best things about twitter and have better moderation (strict enforcement of no hate speech) empower users to freely switch with all their data between different houses and give them better control over who they see ( you can import and export your block list & your favorite users list.)
Don’t like your current instance (house) any more? Pick up our data and move on to another.
One house may fall and yet you can continue your conversations elsewhere.
The strength of a (house) instance relies on the moderation of the person(s) governing the instance, the individuals populating the (instance)
As a moderator (instance owners)
You can limit the number of people living in the house, so you have a nice easy going local timeline
you can choose to which houses updates (toots) you subscribe and have a bustling federated timeline
and then there is your personal timeline, which is your subscription to individuals across (houses) Instances.
You and I can set up a mastodon instance, it’s open source, unlike twitter which grows denser by the day and more restrictive.
Yes. As I’ve said if the moderation fails, the technician (usually the moderator) fails to enact best practices on security of server the instance may disappear.
But the other mastodon nodes will still exist.
I understand everyone would like a stable thing that works right out of the gate, but if we never try, we’ll be stuck with whatever ‘freedom’ we have now.