They run great on arm, too! I got a raspi 4 running everything smooth as butter. The most problematic aspect is interfacing with the usb drives; I eventually had to move them to a powered hub to get the required current.
I have it open on another tab, I use it pretty much every day. I've built incredible friendships in there; And when I started I knew nobody on the protocol. A lot of the people I am mutuals with aren't even on the same instance as me; and yet, somehow I was able to find and connect with them. When they post things, I see it. When I post things they see it.
Like, what you are saying is so nonsensical as to be not even wrong.
I /think/ you are trying to say something about discoverability, but like, it's not really that hard. You can just watch the local or federated tabs, and if you see anything interesting check it out. If someone seems alright you might even reply to something they post. Pretty soon you are having conversations, and the people you follow are boosting other nice, interesting people onto your home tab. Next thing you know, you are part of a community. It's great!
And all of this happens without the need for some weird corporate overlord to try and mediate the experience
by way of manipulating you in order to keep you online longer so they can steal your data and shove ads down your optic nerves.
I think I'd prefer a website that is decentralized by being hosted in multiple places, but still a single instance. No single entity would control it, but everyone would go to a single location to view it.
Micro.blog works in a way somewhat similar to that. A very Twitter-like timeline is effectively centralized, but behind the scenes everything is built on open standards like Atom, webmentions, etc., and your "account" is actually just your own blog -- although that blog can be hosted (for $5/month) on Micro.blog itself. It has a web interface a lot like Twitter's, a first-party client and several third-party clients, and in most respects just a much nicer user experience than Mastodon.
On the flip side, Micro.blog has a very different culture than Mastodon seems to[1], makes some very opinionated choices that many people might not agree with (e.g., there's not only nothing like retweets, but likes and even followers aren't public information), and of course, the easiest way to use it costs money.
[1]: Yes, I know there are lots of instances with different cultures, but there really is a kind of left-wing anarchist vibe across a lot of Mastodon; it's hard to explain if you haven't experienced it. Micro.blog comes across as generally more gentle, very conversational, and more Gen-X than millennial, if that makes any sense. (If it doesn't, sorry. Again, hard to explain if you haven't experienced it.)
Yes to all of those. The only issue is some smaller instances with limited admin bandwidth might only federate automatically with larger, well moderated instances to help reduce their own moderation burden.
If you want to be well federated even with the smaller instances, you need to hang around for a while; build connections within the larger communities; then ask to federate with any smaller instances you want to connect directly with.
It seems like there's a lot of friction involved with connecting to the wider ecosystem. You can sign up to a smaller instance but then federating with others may be problematic. Or you can sign up to a larger one, but it seems like network effects might eventually have things evolve to just a few massive instances, somewhat defeating the purpose of decentralization. Or you can host your own, which would be a technical hurdle for many and come with its own burdens.
Snowflakes, man