> Then they closed registrations, and every post that was saying something similar was suddenly linking to an instance that no longer accepted new accounts. [...] And now users will need to do the exact thing that you (presumably) wanted to avoid: choosing an instance from a list.

At this point the Mastodon.social people also run Mastodon.online and the last time Mastodon.social closed registrations it redirected people to Mastodon.online as the biggest headline redirect, with the choose from a list as the second option.

So far, whatever "load balancing scheme" that Mastodon gGmBH is running they haven't closed registrations on both Mastodon.social and Mastodon.online at the same time.

That said, personally, I would never suggest to someone that Mastodon.social or Mastodon.online should be their first instance as I think the two huge instances give a poor first impression of what the "Fediverse" can be, but that's as much as that I like the "small neighborhood" feel of many other types of instances and that showcases Mastodon's strengths better than Mastodon.social/Mastodon.online look enough like Xitter/Threads/BlueSky firehoses that people feel comfortably familiar (but not enough like them that people feel some friction/dissonance). But it probably is fine advice for this particular blog post.

> The first thing that comes to mind is if you visit a different Mastodon instance and want to "Like" a post. Don't you have to go back to your own instance and find this post on your instance before you can "Like" it?

First up, why are you browsing a different instance directly and not just following it from your home instance or home client/app at least? (Most of the reasons I'd think to do at this point that are cases when the instances don't federate, in which case you can't send that "Like" anyway.) Sure, people post links in other places like websites and Discord, but "I saw this in passing somewhere and thought to Like it" rarely feels like a need I have. It's not like the old Twitter where likes fed algorithms and you might be trying to game your algorithm views, or the badder days of Twitter where Likes became soft-retweets that random followers would see. Mastodon likes are truly disconnected "kudos" (which is also something great about them), and just liking something you see flit by outside of the feeds of your home instance I think is much less of a need overall. (Boosts maybe are a bit more worth it, but even then, Mastodon doesn't have the same sort of "retweet culture" that other social networks have. I know a lot of Mastodon users with boosts entirely turned off from their feeds and they are happy about that.)

Second, there is a "federated like flow" and the main Mastodon client can actually help you login to your home instance and like the post you were looking at. It is certainly more complicated than the usual "Login to Like" because it needs in the pop up window to open the login prompt of your home instance in a relatively standard OAuth-like flow, but it works well some of the time. (It does open up more ways for credential stealing from bad/evil instances, sure.)

Third, finding posts on your own instance is mostly simple enough because you just copy and paste the webpage address (URL) into your instance and that works every time (so long as the remote instance isn't blocked) whether your instance already saw that post sometime earlier or it needs to download its own copy at that search request. Discovering that is all you need to do can be complicated for non-technical users, but it is a skill that so far I've found easy enough to teach to friends that I have that needed to learn that.