You don't. You join one - or host your own - and your mastodon instance is connected to the others. You can follow users on any other public mastodon instance.
That's their mastodon instances, not anyone else's, it's up to them to do what they want
If Mastodon ever takes off for real, I expect that professionally run servers will be pretty popular.
You only have to make a login on one, and you can still talk to people on the others. It’s like email.
You don't have nor would be able to create an email address in all public email servers. (Without mentioning private/non-public email servers or personal/family ones of others)
One: https://joinmastodon.org/communities
Another: https://instances.social
Mastodon is a ways away from that currently though.
It seems like Mastadon or a 3rd party would have to come up with a novel, effective solution to the issue of content discover that no one else has found yet. It's not just about providing search results, but in general showing users what they might be interested. Right now that can be done via lists and directories that are still relatively small enough to browse a lot of it and get a general sense of a lot of what is there to choose from.
But maybe it doesn't have to solve that problem better than others have to avoid their pitfalls. The second link up in this thread is at least an open source search engine so the algorithm can be scrutinized. Even if they converge on similar content discovery solutions, as long as the search engines that pop up are open source then people can at least know how the results are weighted.
No ty!
Very happy with my home timeline and 'local' timeline, don't need anyone trying to get me addicted to something else.
While I certainly see the utility in truly global search / discovery systems (they're great!), all the big ones turn deeply abusive and manipulative in time, because they are all ranking systems of some kind, which can be gamed[1]. Nothing has ever fixed that issue, and I'm not sure it's possible to. Small communities can more reasonably deal with it by hand when necessary, so they can get closer to what they meant rather than what they said, which is what I think most people want/need.
[1]: "Closest text match" ranks in favor of both precise words and phrases, and commonly used ones (you can game it by being predictably-niche or by using the most used things). "Most recent" ranks heavily on frequency (game it by doing things a million times per day). "Page rank" is literally just a popularity contest, easily swayed by money and connections like all popularity. It doesn't matter what you're doing, you're promoting something and thus providing a way to control your promotion to determined parties.
That's like saying you don't need search engines to view websites — your friends could just email you links to good ones. Technically true, sure.
Like, what you are saying is so nonsensical as to be not even wrong.
I /think/ you are trying to say something about discoverability, but like, it's not really that hard. You can just watch the local or federated tabs, and if you see anything interesting check it out. If someone seems alright you might even reply to something they post. Pretty soon you are having conversations, and the people you follow are boosting other nice, interesting people onto your home tab. Next thing you know, you are part of a community. It's great!
And all of this happens without the need for some weird corporate overlord to try and mediate the experience by way of manipulating you in order to keep you online longer so they can steal your data and shove ads down your optic nerves.
And where would the database live?
On the flip side, Micro.blog has a very different culture than Mastodon seems to[1], makes some very opinionated choices that many people might not agree with (e.g., there's not only nothing like retweets, but likes and even followers aren't public information), and of course, the easiest way to use it costs money.
[1]: Yes, I know there are lots of instances with different cultures, but there really is a kind of left-wing anarchist vibe across a lot of Mastodon; it's hard to explain if you haven't experienced it. Micro.blog comes across as generally more gentle, very conversational, and more Gen-X than millennial, if that makes any sense. (If it doesn't, sorry. Again, hard to explain if you haven't experienced it.)
Well, you used to be able to. They eventually closed it off, of course.
I think your concern is highly valid. Mastodon is a protocol-based network, much as SMTP email, NNTP Usenet, HTML+HTTP Web, IRC-based chat, and others are and have been. It's susceptible to the same types of challenges which have either centralised or killed off those platforms.
You mention sheer size. That's only one option.
There's the old Triple-E: Extend, Embrace, Extinguish. Applied successfully by Microsoft to DOS, the Office Suite, and Web browsers. By Google to Web Search and Web Browsers, to email, and increasingly to Web design and hosting. By Slack to Web Messaging. By Facebook to social media.
There's the risk of small instances fading away (happened to me with Mastodon.cafe) or large ones being bought (Mastodon.cloud). There's the prospect of admins going rogue (witches.town). Or, from the Diaspora* world, of admins dying with no succession plan in place (pluspora.com).
There are the Four Horsement of the Infopocalypse: drug-dealers, money-launderers, terrorists, and pedophiles. That's largely what killed off Usenet: the inability to defend against either malicious use of networks or those who made hay of that use to advocate for the shutting down of those networks. (This was combined with the lack of a compelling business argument for keeping them operating.)
There may simply be the staling of the protocol and paradigm. Mastodon is fun and interesting, yes, but lacks robust search, filtering, and privacy-management tools (e.g., auto-expiring posts), as well as obvious issues in scaling. If, say, a manageable instance size is 10,000 users, and Mastodon is to scale to serve an appreciable fraction of the roughly 10 billion people worldwide --- each instance administrator needs to at least consider 10^(10-5) or 10^6 other server relationships. It's one thing to keep track of reputations of a few thousand other servers, it's another to deal with millions, absent some robust tools for management, reputation, appeal, and similar factors. (My suspicion is that some degree of hierarchy with intermediate "hub" servers would emerge at some point.)
That said: Mastodon has proved robust and resilient beyond the predictions of numerous early critics. Not without flaws and issues, but those have to date been surmounted.