I'm stunned that people still today don't realize that there is no, big and centralized free services. How would that work on the company side? Who pays for giant servers and software development and maintenance? People are not too sharp in 2018.
I'll respond here to all of you that responded generally with "you pay with your data, it's not free."
Ok fine, but you don't know what you're paying with on Mastodon, because you have no idea what any one node might do with your data, because there is no centralized privacy policy. Not a problem, I'm sure you read the privacy policy of every website you join right?
I'm also not sure why you assume a free, ad-based Mastodon service wouldn't exist as the network scaled.
The network has like 100k active users. It's very much in 'virtue untested' territory.
I haven't tried Mastadon yet, but the fact I can run my own server for my family or close friends at a very low cost seems very appealing. To me this seems like the most likely use case, I can't imagine just going around joining random nodes, so I'm not too woried about the "virtue" of the whole network.
I'm happy to know that there is a solid, open source option like this out there.
Wikipedia?