Are mastodon instances kinda like IRC servers? Can you only talk to people in your instance? This is going to confuse any non-tech person and scare them off.
@raven Not exactly. Just like twitter you'll see people you follow, who follow and fave you in your notifications. The Federated Timeline contains everyone who is followed by anyone on the server you're on. It's not a complete timeline, but it's big enough. As you find and follow more people the federated timeline will grow for everyone on your server.
@leo I wonder how that will scale if mastodon expands to 1 million users or 1 billion
@leo it kind of seems like each instance will tend towards consuming the "firehose" of all other instances which is where my concern lie
@robinjanssens I don't know the details of mastodon or GNU social but Federation has existed since Usenet. I ran a Echonet server 30 years ago and it worked well then. I think federation is a fairly well understood technique.
@robinjanssens It will scale a lot better than Twitter did.