It doesn’t matter what “instance” you sign up for with email, you’ll get all mail. But just the email for YOU. If you pick federated on Mastodon you get half a billion messages a minute and none of them are for you.
But that’s how twitter works too, so the concept wouldn’t be alien if you’ve used twitter before. I actually was pretty confused by how you’re supposed to use twitter when I first used it (how do you follow a conversation between multiple people, how do you find people in a certain field, etc).
I would argue that mastodon has a huge advantage over either email or twitter since it doesn’t bring any new ideas, it’s just a combination of things that people have been using for a while. It just “fixes” twitter, it shouldn’t have been centralized in the first place.
No, Twitter has an algorithm. As much as people hate them, algorithms are what make social media actually interesting. 99.99% of creators I follow on TikTok (for example) I would have never ever found if all I had was a chronological feed of messages.
@r1veRRR I was on social media both before and after algorithmic curation, and I find it no more interesting now (less if anything). YMMV.