Also the author says that I should choose a community between 500 and 5000 people, which fosstodon exceeds.
All in all, my point is, there are so many choices and decisions to make before I can even create an account and experience it.
It’s fairly common knowledge that people actually don’t like choice. When you go to a restaurant and see a menu with 100 choices, people actually enjoy their meal less than when there would be little choice; they have this nagging feeling of “was that other choice perhaps better?”
For me, Mastadon has the same problem. Too much choice is a bug, not a feature.
Also, some nodes maintain blocklists of other nodes. [0] So while you can still follow those people and see them in your following feed, posts from users on that node will -not- appear in the public feed (posts from nodes in the federated network).
https://instances.social/ exists to help you find a node but I'm not sure how up to date or accurate it is.
As much as I wished that wasn't the case, most people just want to join an established network and don't care about federation as a concept. A long as a single server doesn't take over altogether, however, I don't think there is a problem with large servers.
If you are going to go with bigger servers, what is Mastadon doing to support them (socially, not technically)?
Also, mastodon.social has about half a million users, and they are having performance problems. I'm guessing if you want to scale that up by a factor of 10 or 100 you're going to need new infrastructure.
In short, it marks your old account as migrated, and messages is sent to your followers instances, asking them to subscribe to your new feeds instead. For the most part it's pretty seamless.
A month after I joined, they had a disk crash and my account was gone. It looked like everyone recreated from scratch, so I did the same.
Two weeks later and without notice they restored a backup, overwriting everything that had happened since. I continued, but with rapidly declining interest to accompany my total loss of trust.
Two more months later the server was down permanently.
This is a misunderstanding of what people like.
What people like is good defaults, because choosing is work. When 90% of everything is crap, nobody even wants to see anything but the 10% that isn't. They don't even want to see anything other than the one option which is the best for them, if somebody can give them that without making them do the work.
The problem is that the best option is not the same for everybody. Even if it's the same for 70% of people, that lets you make that option the default and make 70% of people happy, but the other 30% still need the option to do something else.
And sometimes there isn't any one option that can satisfy any majority of people. Then there isn't any better alternative than giving people a list of options to choose from.
But you could still put the list in a better order. Put the "editor's choice" options near the top and the crummiest ones near the bottom. If someone is in Queens, show them the regional server for New York City on the first page and the regional server for Los Angeles on the hundredth page, and a link next to it that says "show other regions" and leads to a regional map. That sort of thing.