I hate selfies, so whenever I’m on vacation I just take pictures of my surroundings but never with me in it. Once my cousin wanted to see my vacation pics so I showed them; he then asked why I’m not in any of them. When I said I didn’t think it was necessary, his genuine confused reply was, “But how do people know you were really there, then?”
It’s really insane out there.
As someone who’s had a single-user Mastodon instance for two years now: I love it. It’s definitely not for everyone, for reasons mainly stated in the article. However, if you like a more personal, highly-curated federated timeline, a single-user instance is great.
I 90% use Mastodon to keep up with my friends’ posts and see art and animal pictures (and I hate interacting with strangers LOL), so I curate my instance to only subscribe to them. For the remaining 10%, I have a secondary account on a larger instance for when I want to read the news etc. It’s worked well for me, but again, it’s surely not for everyone!