[andreyk]

Signing up and using it is no more complicated than Twitter once you choose an instance. The Gradient (which I am part of) set up a new Mastodon instance (sigmoid.social) last week for the AI community which now has 3.5k active users - it took off rather quickly. My hope is that Mastodon becomes like a cross between Discord and Twitter; specific communities such as AI people set up an instance for themselves via a simple hosting service (eg we used MastoHost which made it almost as easy as starting a Slack or Discord) which makes signing up super easy.

[luckylion]

Are there stats on how much of the network uses managed hosts like MastoHost? That sounds like a giant target.

It's nice that they allow off-migration and don't lock your community in.

[andreyk]

I don't think it a large proportion; the vast majority of users are on a few large instances such as Mastodon.social which are not via MastoHost. The owner also stated he would not want to host more than a 4th of all instances

https://masto.host/the-25-percent-commitment/

We will likely migrate to our own cloud setup once size gets stable.

[OctopusLupid]

Related to this: fedi.monster is a good alternative provider too.