@Dan_Blick thanks. Feels very Tweetdeck-ish right now. You know anyone who is running their own instance of this?

@clintlalonde I'm working to get one setup this week. I've also been experimenting with talking to mastodon.social programmatically.

@Dan_Blick @clintlalonde So if you make an "instance" it still somehow talks to the larger platform? I am trying so hard to wrap my small bookish brain around this.

@actualham @Dan_Blick Exactly. Esentially, you could host your own instance of Mastodon (like you have your own website) and it would connect to other instances of Mastodon. potential best of both worlds - you get to own your own data AND get the network effects of distributed network. That's the theory anyway.

@clintlalonde @Dan_Blick Still trying to understand what that looks like, how it works. It's that whole federated idea? Love it in theory, and so curious to watch what that ends up looking like.

@actualham so I can't find a lot of other instances yet, but a few are listed https://github.com/Gargron/mastodon/wiki/List-of-Mastodon-instances To understand federation, go to one of them, find a user you want to follow, then come back here and use the search feature to see if you can find and add them

@actualham though it looks like those others are either closed or offline. so that might not work. Anyways, that's the idea - you can have a single account on a server with its own policies, but follow others on other servers. i.e. campuses or other larger aggregates could run these, deals with scale issue as well as not needing one policy fits all

@sleslie Wow-- thanks for that great explanation!