I really don't like the idea of topic-specific instances being the standard way to handle group discussions in Mastodon. I don't want to juggle 15 different identities and 15 different sets of credentials just because I'm interested in 15 different things. Early adopters may put up with that kind of hassle, but a mass audience never will. And having to set up and maintain a whole instance just to host a group means that few groups will ever be formed.
I feel like there has to be a better way.
@jalefkowit Absolutely. Instance and Topic/community of interest are different levels of abstraction. In the same way that NNTP server and newsgroup or SMTP server and mailing list or IRC server and channel are different levels.
@jalefkowit This seems completely obvious to me that there's a hierarchy of Instance, multiple Groups, each with multiple Threads. I don't really understand why this is in question.
@jalefkowit And yes, absolutely, one identity per topic/community of interest is absurd.