So the cool part about Mastodon, right? You don't need to be on the same domain as other people to talk to them. You can sign-up on or invite your friends to:
mastodon.madrid
mastodon.cat
mastodon.eus
And many others, and still be able to talk to the world / follow your friends on mastodon.social and vice versa.
Please help those servers grow by spreading the word about them! (And if you are interested in starting a new server, you can do that too!)
@Gargron Yes and no. It's true for direct communication between people, but difficult to just follow hashtags across instances as you can't subscribe to hastags worldwide. Mastodon is like email, but it should more become like IRC, so every node has the same view of the world.
https://social.lsnet.eu/@ls/103390347989631550
@FiXato @Gargron Yes and it is good to have the possibility to choose between different networks. But Mastodon is like IRC where each server has its own local channels plus some random messages from other servers. I installed my own Mastodon instance some days ago and wanted to read the #36c3 messages from the other instances. But that's a quite lonely experience. You can't make a "peering agreement" which every other instance so you need perhaps decentralized databases, I don't know
@FiXato I'm the only user of my instance. And @Gargron said, it doesn't matter what instance you're on. I don't think relays work at a large scale because they're centralized bottlenecks and preventing loops is difficult. I think you should to be able to subscribe to '#$hashtag @ $instance'-patterns, with wildcards allowed for both $hashtag and $instance, as you can't feed world traffic through small instances and filter locally.