Paradoxically, therefore, the best way for a person completely fresh to the decentralised Mastodon network to experience the benefits of that decentralisation, with its variety of different instances and different perspectives, is to join its largest possible instance, thus effectively contributing to its de-facto centralisation.
EDIT: the hits keep coming
Mastodon doesn’t scale well, and its user base accepts no funding model other than charity
this was my biggest question about lemmy, if free content hosting ala twitter, reddit, imgur, google photos, etc is a VC-fueled loss leader to eventually lock ppl in with network effects and then start charging, that means free hosting via lemmy isn't really sustainable either...
a bit more article commentary via the latest kbd.news editorial: https://kbd.news/Quick-weekly-BTS-2023-27-2054.html