I still don’t get it. If the author is into FOSS and could choose between one of the FOSS servers or the Catalan one... how would you choose? On Twitter I have 3 groups of people I follow (tech, sports, politics). Choosing one topic for a server wouldn’t that mean my local timeline would have people going on and on about one of my topics, but virtually nothing about the others? That would be extremely boring.
My impression is Mastodon expects you to join a server oriented towards some particular interest group, then to find and follow individual users from other Mastodon servers who you want to hear from. But it seems to be designed with the expectation that most of your read/write will be inside your chosen server. That doesn't sound well-aligned with common use cases.
I feel like this is a common fallacy about Mastodon and something I disagree with the article here about. In my view the local timeline is a mostly useless red herring that sometimes causes new users to the network to suffer analysis paralysis (you see several comments here about "but which one do I join???"). For what it is worth, I'm a solo user of a personal instance and my local timeline is indeed useless and just everything I've posted.
Though I agree with the article that the Federated timeline is also useless. (Who reads the public Everything on Twitter feed? It's a fast scrolling mess of useless. Federated is that.) The only timeline that matters is the Home timeline where you see the people you follow, and who they boost (if you like). That's just like Twitter. The whole point of Federation is that it doesn't matter which instance you are on you should be able to follow just about anyone you want.
As others point out, focusing people on the local timeline forces people to "pick a lunch table in high school" before feeling like they can use the network. It's a distraction when picking an instance, and it's a "sunk cost fallacy" feeling that leads to so much of the angst about "portable identity" because it puts the cart before the horse. It ties you identity to something someone else owns "the cafeteria table", rather that the classic answer in federated systems: if you want a portable identity that you own/control, get your own domain name.
(Yes, that's a tough answer for non-technical average users, but there are solutions to that too, just as "custom domain email host" is just about googleable to solve today there are a couple of Mastodon hosts that will run just about everything for you and BYOD or buy one through an affiliate link with them.)
I'm not sure it was ever designed with that in mind. Almost all my interaction is with people on other instances, and I'm pretty sure that's true for most people (unless you're on gab, as they are blocked by everybody)
