If I'd wanted my user account tied to a server controlled by somebody else, I'd just use Twitter. Mastodon isn't solving any problems here.
The beauty of Nostr is that it turns the server into a dumb relay, the server controls and owns nothing and you can replace it with another one at anytime or broadcast to multiple at once to begin with. The user is in full control and everything is held together by public-key crypto.
Is it practical for an individual with a $4 VPS to spin up a mastadon server + front end client for their own use and have it interact with existing servers? Curious how much friction there is that users end up in on someone else's machine
Mastodon is a fairly finicky beast, has a few dependencies that you also have to manage (redis, sidekiq, Postgres), and is surprisingly resource intensive.
So you can do it, but it’s not really designed for that use case.
I would be great if there were a full-featured single user ActivityPub server, but last time I looked, there wasn’t really.
Ah makes more sense thanks. iirc mastadon doesn't have much of an identity migration story, except for using domain control as proof of identity which is kinda neat. I still like DNS and TLDs as a pay-to-play distributed namespace if you're going to have a persistent identity that can travel from server to server, and change hands as property from one owner to another. (I think there is case law on domain names being property, somewhat unique in cyberspace)
The magic moment is importing your secret key into an alternate client and all your contacts, posts, and feed populate from the data stored in the relays.