Interesting to note that this was originally posted a little over a year ago. I don’t know if anything has changed since, as I don’t self host masto and have been spending more and more of my “fedi-time” here in lemmy.

Not surprised that someone who “led AI and subscription products at Amazon for the past 8 years” ended up back on mastodon.social, but that’s probably neither here nor there…

Just uses Akkoma or GoToSocial, setup fedifetcher or follow some relays and you can get good enough experience in Fediverse. Mastodon is literally build to handle huge amount of users so it is nowhere near efficient if used for just 1 person.

You mean you’ll only see content from people you follow and only people who follow you will see you content? Sounds like working as intended the way things were meant to be.