Highly recommend folks check out Mastodon as well - fully decentralized, no ads, no algo, no corporate control.
It is continuing to grow steadily and has tons of activity compared to a few years ago.
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It is continuing to grow steadily and has tons of activity compared to a few years ago.
That basic hurdle is the reason why it is a barrier to many potential new users and it has traded complexity over ease of onboarding when trying to sign up new users (who are not techies or sys-admins).
One solution is to set a default instance. I.e 'mastodon.social' and tell users to sign up there. Again, that increases the issue of centralization. To prevent that, you close sign ups and tell users to sign up elsewhere. Then the issue continues on other instances.
Along side other issues, that is why new users just went to Bluesky or Threads instead.