You said it yourself — you're new to self hosting, and CasaOS fits what you want to host. As a starting point for getting rid of hosted services, go with that for a start.
Sure, you won't immediately be getting your hands dirty mucking about with dockers and stuff, but you will have your working home server. For learning and experimentation, I second @Scipitie@lemmy.dbzer0.com's plan B — use another machine to test building the same setup on a base Linux system.
If you're like me you probably have an old laptop lying around that wouldn't be great as an always up, day to day server, but as a testing environment to mess around with docker containers it should be fine?
I dunno, over the course what, six months? A year? And since there's been an influx of Twitter users they're probably frantically liking every old follow/er they see to recreate their network.
Also, on Bluesky likes influence the algorithm more than it would on the fediverse, so who can blame them for gauging the ecosystem?
I'll be honest, I never tried. Seeing that there are projects working independently to bring Debian, Ubuntu, and Arch to Android, I'd guess no? Plus I know you can run any distro in an emulator within Android systems, but that feels more like a curiosity.
I think Fedi Garden does a good job of making it accessible, but I still think that curated list needs updating.
None of the automated find-me-an-instance sites have really convinced me, but I have an okay niche server for my interests, and if that folds I'll probably host a GoToSocial instance just for myself...
Yeah, but tech journos are so far up Big Tech's cloaca that they can't imagine any platform emerge without a business plan™. Couple that with their unreflected admiration for anything they're told is The Next Thing and you have the gushing bit you quoted.
I didn't bother clicking through, so grain of salt — wouldn't torrent indexers and search sites also be included in this many site blocks? Streaming sites seems to be the lowest hanging fruit.
I mean, yeah. Especially when the content of your flawlessly customised site is federated to thousands other activity pub enabled sites with different stylesheets and aesthetics. That isn't a problem with Mastodon per se, it's just the nature of federation.
I do agree with your broader point that Mastodon has become synonymous with fediverse microblogging, which again is what most people associate with the fediverse, period.
30% self-congratulatory talk about how popular bluesky is this week.
TBF, Mastodon was the same when I joined. I just muted all mention of "mastodon" + variations, Bob's your uncle. Navel gazing meta discourse is the least exciting updates on any platform.
It is still funny to visit random egg profiles on there and see they only tooted once, two years ago, saying "so this is mastodon, wonder how this works" and then never again.
Actually, they updated with a security fix on November 5 🙂