[donio]

> ... but I can’t understand why I would choose any particular server over another.

Email is often a good analogy for questions like these: Why do you pick one email service over the other? Maybe you think the domain is cool. Maybe you heard that they are reliable or have features that others don't. Maybe your university, company or other community you belong to runs its own service. Or you decide to host your own. Or you really have no preference and you just go with the one your friend uses.

We just don't have just don't have the gmail-equivalent catch-all choices yet. Maybe that will come later or maybe it won't.

[crazygringo]

Except that with e-mail there are obvious good reasons, which basically boil down to whether you've centered your digital life around the Google, Microsoft, or Apple ecosystems (or never moved away from Yahoo, etc.).

These are recognizably proven brands that aren't going to disappear next year, and which integrate with your other tools in ways that clearly provide benefit.

And back in the day before webmail was a thing, your ISP gave you an e-mail address so you didn't pick at all.

But none of these are even remotely applicable to Mastodon instances. So I'm not sure that e-mail is actually a helpful analogy at all here.

[nightpool]

Maybe not from the outside. But after a few months of actively using the platform with a curious mindset, I'd wager you'd have a much stronger idea of how instances differ. That's the main service I see the "pseudo-default" mastodon.social providing in the current world—as a "jumping off" point that people can use prior to migrating to more specific instances with more customizations or better communities.

[donio]

That's what I meant by "no catch-all choices yet". There is no reason Google or Apple couldn't get in the game if they choose to. Supposedly Facebook is making a go at it for whatever that's worth.

I offered the email analogy because that helped me to wrap my head around it when I was starting out.

[foogazi]

> But none of these are even remotely applicable to Mastodon instances.

Sure they are - come join my instance which I run from a pentium beige box in my closet and check the uptime

[jojobas]

Email is much better than that. Even if you don't want to maintain your own email server you can still register your own domain and assign it to a hosting service for a trivial amount.

You can also do that with Mastodon if you're keen, so email analogy holds.

[JoshTriplett]

And for both email and the Fediverse, there's an ideal answer that requires only marginally more work: have your own domain. In both cases, you don't have to host a server yourself, you can pay for email hosting and use your own domain. For email, services like Fastmail let you bring your own domain. For the Fediverse, https://togethr.party/ works well.

[drdaeman]

This works with email, but not so much with Fediverse. There is no standard or - AFAIK - even attempts domain/account sharing (unless you hack your way around), you'll have to be [e-mail] and [e-mail] and [e-mail], but not [at least not easily] [e-mail] if you want to use it with multiple systems.

[ajdude]

I had absolutely no issues with hosting my own mastodon, I pay $7 dollars a month for a VPS with backups. I'm the only user that can register on my instance so it's just me.

I'm `@[e-mail]` and I can follow and have conversations with other mastodon users of various servers seamlessly. I was just doing it this evening in a thread while tagging four different people on four different servers. When people tag me in posts it just looks like `@aj`

This is the right way to do this stuff in my opinion.

[drdaeman]

> I had absolutely no issues with hosting my own mastodon

Just Mastodon - it's not what I'm talking about. Please let me know if my parent comment wasn't clear enough.

Mastodon certainly works and you can be just @aj (as long as no one else with the same host-local part walks in, I guess) no matter where the actual conversation is hosted. But what about Lemmy, Peertube, or other Fediverse systems? I'm aware that Mastodon can talk to them with some success, but AFAIK it is only optimized to present certain types of content, so if you want Reddit-like user experience rather than Twitter-like one you want Lenny. And then you need a different subdomain. And then you realize you're splitting your identity on the same network in two - and in my opinion that's an indicator that something is wrong.

[v64]

>I'm aware that Mastodon can talk to them with some success, but AFAIK it is only optimized to present certain types of content, so if you want Reddit-like user experience rather than Twitter-like one you want Lenny.

This is partially true. I run Pleroma, which is a microblogging server like Mastodon, so Mastodon content that federates to my instance shows up identically to my own posts. On a system like Lemmy, when their posts federate to me, what I see natively on my instance is a person posting a link that links to the originating website. I can see some replies inline, but they're linear and not threaded like on Lemmy. However, unlike what you said, still using my @[e-mail] identity, I can click the link from my instance to the Lemmy instance and interact with the content there natively. No need to create a different subdomain. There's no need to host a Lemmy instance yourself if you want to interact with Lemmy instances. Lemmy on the backend is still talking the ActivityPub protocol and it's only the frontend that alters how the posts are presented, so as long as your server speaks ActivityPub, you can use the same identity.

[ajdude]

Are you saying that the primary issue is that for each federated service we need a separate account / instance for it as opposed to email which is just one email account? I don't disagree with that but it's the same situation for Reddit, YouTube, Twitter. I have to maintain separate accounts on those platforms too.

[drdaeman]

Yes. And I get it that we all have separate accounts. The difference is they're entirely separate networks, not one. If I'm on Fediverse, and self-hosting, with my own domain, it's fairly natural to want to have a solid identity, isn't it?

Which is where it's different to email. When self-hosting mail, you can have separate identities too, but those will be created on a purpose (different addresses for different personas/purposes), rather than fragmented because of necessity.

[myaccountonhn]

But you don't have separate identities for Youtube, Gmail, Meet et.c. For a federated internet, you should have the same ID for all federated services so that you can build the same product experience as with Apple or Microsoft or Google.

[JoshTriplett]

It'd be nice if there were a standard forwarding-interoperability server such that several services could share the same account name and local copies of the messages to/from that account. But in the meantime, having @[e-mail] be a Fediverse service like Pleroma or Mastodon, and then having @[e-mail] be the handle for each specialized service, still seems preferable to using a third-party server. And if in the future some mechanism exists for those services to share, you would then be able to use the standard redirect mechanism to preserve the old names while using the shared top-level one as the canonical account name.

[MikusR]

But gmail is not blocked by hotmail or yahoo. You can send and receive from different providers.

[madeofpalk]

Gmail definitely blocks email hosts.

[paulddraper]

Your email choice used to reflect your ISP, and now reflects your chosen platform for file storage, image albums, productivity suite, calendaring, etc.

I'm not sure how this applies to Mastodon servers in practice.