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Originally Posted by Paul
Havent bothered with twatter for years, so not really concerned about joining a rival.
I wonder how well it will cope given how its funded and the need to upgrade its servers.
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Well, it is decentralised so not all users are ever going to be a member of the original Mastodon.social server. What’s supposed to happen is you sign up on a server in your part of the world or which reflects your interests (Mastodonapp.uk is a popular one here; I’m on Mastodon.scot). Obviously each of these is still volunteer run, but each individual community presumably has a much more modest server load and only needs to be moderated locally.
Even though you join one Mastodon server you can chose to follow users from any other server and you can still search across the entire network for hashtags etc. The caveat to that is that each local Mastodon server has to know about all the others. All the main ones should interconnect easily enough but there’s no guarantee of universal cross-connectivity, especially if the admin on the server you’re a member of, takes exception to something about the way another one is run.
What all of this means for the costs and the time commitment of running a Mastodon server remains to be seen. The data you’ve found is for the non-profit organisation in Germany that develops the software and runs the original Mastodon.social server. It’s not currently possible to sign up for an account on Mastodon.social, though as described, it’s not necessary to be a member of that one directly.