As someone who's had a single-user Mastodon instance for two years now: I love it. It's definitely not for everyone, for reasons mainly stated in the article. However, if you like a more personal, highly-curated federated timeline, a single-user instance is great.

I 90% use Mastodon to keep up with my friends' posts and see art and animal pictures (and I hate interacting with strangers LOL), so I curate my instance to only subscribe to them. For the remaining 10%, I have a secondary account on a larger instance for when I want to read the news etc. It's worked well for me, but again, it's surely not for everyone!

I agree with this take, and recently I actually read this article that criticizes how server centric fedi is as a whole. If it's hard and expensive for a layperson to self host, but you need to have an account associated with a specific server, then you're going to end up with a system where you're under the whims of a instance owner still. Not to mention the whole pick a server step severely hurts our adoption rates.

I like the idea of having an account just being a public and private key pair. Theoretically you could make one client side, use it to sign your messages, and servers could verify the signature and distribute your post without needing to have an explicit account for you. You could send every message to a random instance and it'd still work. You wouldn't have to worry about links to the "wrong instance" and you wouldn't have to attach your identity to a instance that might shut down or be bought by a bad person. The server would be essentially irrelevant.

With a small amount of effort and the use of https://github.com/nanos/FediFetcher and https://github.com/g3rv4/GetMoarFediverse you can mitigate basically all those issues. It's still not perfect by any means but it results in a perfectly usable single user instance.

The first populates the replies of the home timeline posts you see (as well as profiles of people it finds in those replies) and the second pulls down all the content from instances you select for your followed hashtags (choose mastodon.social and you can guarantee you'll see most all posts with those tags)

The only complaint on this list that, I think, is a legitimate complaint is replies not loading. Imagine if Lemmy worked that way. The rest is just how it's intended to work.

Certainly a good warning before trying to self host but this isn't broken.

I works much better with Akkoma, but yes there are certain down-sides to single-user instances.

You mean you'll only see content from people you follow and only people who follow you will see you content? Sounds like working as intended the way things were meant to be.

Interesting to note that this was originally posted a little over a year ago. I don't know if anything has changed since, as I don't self host masto and have been spending more and more of my "fedi-time" here in lemmy.

Not surprised that someone who "led AI and subscription products at Amazon for the past 8 years" ended up back on mastodon.social, but that's probably neither here nor there...

@cypherpunks I've got the feeling as if the author doesn't know about the existence of relay servers. With them, also a single user instance works really fine, I think.

It can also be an awesome idea, depending on your perspective. Having an instance without all the cruft is a pristine peaceful thing at times. For a while I ran one of those subscriber bots on Lemmy and pretty quickly found it to be so full of shitposting spam as to be unusable. Just don't start an instance and expect it to be a raging party and you won't find it disappointing.

Just uses Akkoma or GoToSocial, setup fedifetcher or follow some relays and you can get good enough experience in Fediverse. Mastodon is literally build to handle huge amount of users so it is nowhere near efficient if used for just 1 person.