per @per@computerfairi.es

a 5 to 50 user server would not be terribly expensive, but any bigger than that and it becomes more serious that it's not an impulse decision

if it seems like the route we do want to go, i do think a kinni.es masto instance would be doable. but i don't want to make that decision right away, bc it requires an amount of buy-in (both in terms of time investment and money investment)

i would not want to set it up and then have it be abandoned in a week, y'know

so posting on public timelines seems to be the equivalent of like, Server-wide Shout

"The federated timeline is a view of all the public toots your servers knows about from across the whole network (including local ones). The most common reason that something appears in the federated timeline is that someone from your server follows the author of that toot. This column moves fast, and can often be pretty wild."

https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2018/08/mastodon-quick-start-guide/

I misunderstood what the "federated" timeline was originally. I'm trying to find a better definition

@wren https://youtu.be/rY6Ja--zQ1s

To be honest I find these settings very interesting and handy to me, but I can absolutely see them being confusing or opaque

I *do* find it to be just a little bit annoying to make sure I have the setting switched on every new post, but, I could also get used to it

Interestingly, you can post Followers-only posts on a public account (which means they're viewable only by followers, but anyone can follow you to see them)

You can also post Public/Unlisted posts on a locked account. which means you can separate between public-facing posts and private posts on the same account

Locked account with "Followers-only" post setting is the closest to a locked Twitter account

Unlocked account with "Unlisted" post setting seems to be the closest to a normal public Twitter account (with the exception that you won't show up in searches here if you're set to unlisted)

locked accounts seem a little quirky over here. your posts can still be public if you're not paying attention - you need to make sure you have "followers only" selected if you want them to be followers only

i think "unlisted" is probably the post setting most of us want to use for most of our posts, it prevents posts from showing up on either public timeline

(or "followers only" if you're a locked account and want your post accessible only to followers.)

https://gist.github.com/joyeusenoelle/74f6e6c0f349651349a0df9ae4582969#what-is-mastodon this is a handy intro to masto, sort of in the form of an FAQ