| >I get the embrace-extend-extinguish concerns, but there almost seems to be some desire to want to keep Mastodon small and fragmented for various reasons. Much of the culture on Mastodon is anti-capitalist or created by marginalized communities that explicitly fled the mainstream web due to its toxicity and commercialism. They now see a Meta owned corporate behemoth showing up to assimilate them and flood them with all of the garbage they tried to escape. It's very similar to the fear a lot of Hacker News users have about "turning into Reddit," of cultural contamination and Eternal September. It isn't entirely fair but it is understandable. > I'd love to be able to have a single place to follow both using a single app and (importantly) using a single handle For Mastodon, the only solution in this regard seems to be to host a single-user instance, which you can find inexpensive hosts for. Then follow whomever you want, block whomever you want, and add a couple of relays. I agree that identity management is one of the biggest flaws in the protocol. Then again, centralized identity increases the possibility of tracking, harassment and centralized control over platforms so it can be seen as a feature and a bug. I kind of like Tim Berners-Lee's Solid project[0] conceptually, but I don't know what implementations are out there, if any. It would be nice to just host a data file somewhere, maybe with a pgp key, and be able to use that as an identity across implementations. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid_(web_decentralization_pr... |