Comment by Angostura

> Sounds like you want to run your own private instance.

I'd like to do so, yes, but that exposes me to a (not insignificant) financial cost, (especially in Germany) a significant legal risk from CSAM/DMCA et al., and a significant amount of effort in maintenance.

Sure, there are "Mastodon as a service" providers that take at least the legal risk and maintenance off of me, but again, these cost even more money, and now I have the risk that the hoster is a fly-by-night operation that one day decides to close up shop for whatever reason.

And if anything happens to that private instance (say, the hoster disappears, the machine disappears without a backup, or the hoster undergoes an orderly shutdown), in the best case I still may have enough preparation to migrate the followers, but the old content is lost in any case. And that is bad.

In contrast with Bluesky and to a lesser degree Twitter, I can at least be reasonably sure that the provider does not vanish over night.

I think the problem is that it's too onerous to run your own instance, but being on anything but the "default" instance means dealing with volunteer moderators imposing their worldview on the available discourse.

Creating a Mastodon account shouldn't mean supporting the particular political affiliation of the moderators, but I think it feels that way for many of the instances.

And then you are also on the hook to be a sysadmin (including all the legal aspects thereof). That's generally a bit much to ask of someone who just wants to chat with their friends online.