As part of a small party instance, I would like to point out that there are restrictions, e.g. only comments from users who are also followed by someone on their own instance are visible - unless the admin has linked the instance to an external bridge. Furthermore, I recommend to have contact details of an admin outside Mastodon at hand - because if the instance is not reachable, it will quickly become unpleasant.

If you know what you’re getting into and want to accept that so: You can find all instances on https://mastodon.fediverse.observer/list. In addition to Mastodon, I also recommend taking a look at Soapbox (e.g. postblue.social) or Firefish (e.g. firefish.social), which are more modern and offer many more features like formatted posts and quoted posts, but have no character limit like Mastodon.

The problem is that Mastodon, unlike Lemmy or Friendica, requires a mention of you to get a notification of a response, even if it’s your post. Plus, if you don’t have a follower from the instance of the user that replied (which is always the case if it’s a Lemmy-user), the reply won’t even appear.

I don’t see a solution for this.

The pupose of a Like button is to express that you like the post.

And even if this was the reasoning – which is baffling enough as it is

What is baffling about it? The function fulfills exactly the purpose that its name promises.

it wouldn’t make sense since the whole point of boosting something is to tell the public that you like a post.

With a boost, you pass the post to your followers. This is a different feature accordingly.

Like before Boost often seems useful, but hardly in case of bad news.

Firefox for life

It’s not just a Chrome-, it’s a Google thing. If you want to install F-Droid or Exodus on Android today, you have to get past Google’s warning that you are putting malware on your device.

as they don’t go evil

Well… anyone who packs their advertising through third-party sites has long since defected to the dark side. It seems to me that the ghost of Brendan Eich is still haunting Mozilla.

Thanks, that makes sense. Just to double-check: replies are synced across servers, correct?

No. You will only see comments by users who have at least 1 follower on your local instance, at least in the official UI/app.

client for decentralized social network Mastodon which focuses on simple and functional design

For those who are looking for something similar available on both Android and iOS: Recommendation for tooot. Special feature, especially for users of small instances: It loads the comments from the original instance when you open toots, so you don’t just see comments from users who are known on your instance. I haven’t seen this on another app yet on Android.

We don’t need no “moderation”, we don’t need no thought control.

If you don’t want it, that’s absolutely fine - you just have to respect that others don’t share that opinion and cut the line since it’s hard to find a shared Fediverse of opposite ideas. Unmoderated instances have always been seperated in Fediverse-microblogging and I really don’t see why history shouldn’t repeat in this case.

is that really a horrible idea as you say

This is not a question of fact, but of opinion. And yes: I’ve never been significantly active on Reddit, all the notifications I get there are spam porn accounts that follow me in.

To me, open signups seem wrong for a volunteer moderated service.

What they want is moderation. Unlike microblogging where you post to your followers, I think that running a public debate platform like Lemmy without controlling who enters is a horrible idea. That’s why they posted a statement with the clarification that this defederation need not be permanent.