| Based on my experience I feel like you massively overstate the issues with b). > you might be on different instances that mute/ban each other, only an issue if it's actually bans (mutes dont affect following), and if you don't explicitly pick a very ideological instance (either towards banning a lot or towards tolerating behavior that gets you banned a lot) that's not really a problem. I don't believe I've ever encountered a "I want to follow this person but can't", even when e.g. looking through a few hundred accounts I got from my twitter followings. > you might not find each other if you don't know their instances, To follow people you need to know their username, yes (which happens to include the instance). Is there anything where that isn't the case? I certainly wouldn't reliably find my friends on Twitter either without knowing that. > if instances are interest-specific you have to follow on a number of instances, Very few instances are that strictly interest-specific that they force people to take other interests elsewhere. And if someone does run multiple accounts and wants people to follow multiple, they link them so its just a few extra clicks once, hardly a big hurdle in the few cases where it does happen. > if their instance admin gets fed up with it and shuts it down you need to reconnect somehow True if the instance just disappears without warning, otherwise the account move feature handles this transparently. |