Having done it before my honest advice to anyone planning this is:

1. Start with a Mastodon account on a regular server.
2. Build lists of friends etc.
3. After a few months, once you’ve curated a feed you like, move to a self hosted one.

That’s if you intend to use it “socially” as opposed to, say, “commercially” (ie an cartoonist publicizing their work, for example, or even the corporate Mastoverse account for a burger chain), in which case it makes sense to have that account on a private server (where it’s essentially self verifying, and can’t be killed by a single confused overworked instance admin - in the case of the burger chain, also by an instance admin that would rather not host commercial accounts), but also a private account on one of the main servers for just being yourself.

Currently self-hosting my own mastodon server and honestly the setup wasn’t too bad (using docker)… much more straight-forward than I feared.

My main concerns, which Julia mentions, is that if you have a small instance, you are very much an island as the way federation work is not what you expect. For instance, as Julia notes, if you view a new person’s profile on your own instance, it will look empty (as if they haven’t posted anything). Lemmy also has this issue if you view a community you have not subscribed to yet for the first time.

Likewise, my “#explore” tab is basically always empty and discovering new tags or people is difficult if you are just looking on your own instance (I basically have to go to Fossotodon or another instance to find new things and then import them into my own instance). I’ve recently learned that you have to have a third party application basically seed your instance with posts… again, similar to the bot tricks use for seeding Lemmy with communities.

Overall, I think discovery is a big pain point for the fediverse and ActivityPub. It’s great that we can have our own instances and control our own small communities, but it seems that we are lacking the ability to really connect across instances and form experiences that really bridge across multiple communities.

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I’ve been running my own single user instance since I think 2021 (I think I have 4 active users now). It’s worked out very well for me.

The key thing that I found was I had to go out and find people to add. There are existing lists of people, and I also lucked out that at the same time I joined the fediverse, one comedian I like happened to open up an instance which brought a whole bunch of users who were on my level, and once that started then I was able to add all kinds of people from all kinds of different instances.

It was much more upfront work, but eventually my feed was a whole lot of fun and you don’t need to follow many people to have a feed too fast to even follow

Yea I read this, and as someone that would ideally see themselves self-hosting at some point, who also knew about all of these issues already, I was surprised at how much reading about them all in one place put me off of the idea and even mastodon in general.

For some reason their final line about sticking around mastodon because most of the Linux/tech crowd are there right now really struck as me criticising with faint praise (whether intentional or not).

I feel like I am repeatedly reminded of how Mastodon is really an awkward middle ground for social media.

I’m glad lemmy’s fetching seems to be better: once a community is on your instance its there and you get everything except stuff from servers you’ve defederated with.