hypothesis: if too many early users sign up on mastodon.social instead of other instances, federation will end up becoming a second-class feature. (imagine what email today would look like if gmail had existed in the 90s.)

other instances need to be able to compete with mastodon.social for growth, or https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/issues/177 should be implemented.

@bcrypt A nice feature of Mastodon is that you can set up a single-user (aka no-registration) install. Which makes it perfect for running your own federated instance.