[TRiG_Ireland]

What you see on Mastodon is (a) stuff posted by other people on your server, and (b) stuff posted by people on other servers whom people on your server are following. So your choice of server has a strong affect on your feed. And hosting your own instance means that you really need to start following loads of people if you want to keep an eye on what's going on. I suppose I can see this as a good thing, or at least vaguely see why other people might see it as a good thing, but I mostly find it annoying. (It also means that there isn't an overall Mastodon zeitgeist, the way there may have been with Twitter.)

Another, even more annoying side-effect, is that conversations may have bits silently missing, if they're posted by someone not on your instance. I have been reading a thread of seven posts, posted by five different people, and then looked at that same thread from another server and found that it was actually sixteen posts, posted by eight different people, several of which had not federated to my server. I have been irritated by two different people asking me the same questions, leading to two separate threads hanging off my initial comment, covering exactly the same subject, until I looked at the conversations from their servers and realised that they were invisible to each other.

I would never use Mastodon for anything serious: the chance of irritating people, missing context, and talking at cross purposes are far too high.