Comment by jazzyjackson a day ago
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
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)
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.