This is a nice analogy for starters. It's inaccurate, but I think clarifying those differences is something that can happen later if explaining to a new user.<p>Fwiw main inaccuracy is:<p>> <i>A Mastodon server (often called an instance) is just a shared blog host. Kind of like putting your personal blog in a folder on a domain on shared hosting with some of your friends.</i><p>This is technically true but in practice this kind of thing was never common for blogs outside of university servers, so imo doesn't make for a great analogy. It's also important not to fudge analogies like that because Mastodon's shared instances are different to a shared blog host in some interesting ways.<p>Most interestingly: moderation. The moderation model of Mastodon instances is pretty fascinating in practice. While it resembles moderation on oldschool indie bulletin boards, or subreddits, the federation aspect makes it really weird. If Mastodon takes off in a major way (overall network at modern corp social network scale) I think we'll start to see really insightful patterns of network interconnectivity emerging as a result of instance-level federation limit/suspensions lists.
Isn’t mastodon like Twitter, with super short character counts? You can’t blog at that word count. You still get that Twitter-like inability to have discourse and nuance<p>Unless different instances lift that?
if mastadon is "just a blog" then why are you posting this on something that is quite literally _not_ mastadon? if you want to promote mastadon as a blogging platform, why aren't you using it as such? you built your own blogging platform, and you're trying to convince us that mastadon is the right choice? how does that work?
I am amazed that the barrier to Masto entry is apparently so high.<p>It's Twitter but a bit crapper. Just pick any server and start posting. Done.