Asklemmy

Yes. My first Mastodon account was on a server which no longer exists. Unless you are hosting a personal instance, it takes commitment to keep one going, or to at least give your users adequate warning that it is shutting down. Although you could just run a script on a VPS, forget about it for 5 years and let Jesus take the wheel, that's not a nice thing to do.

Sometimes though, the candle which burns twice as bright, burns half as long.

Maybe there needs to be a way to set up regular auto-backups to your local machine (or regular prompts for manual backup), then import history into your new accounts on other servers.

Edit: also there should be a way to change which instance is your "local" for the homepage, irrespective of which one you actually log in to.

Yes it's a meaningful decision, I'm just saying that prospective new users don't necessarily understand what the decision means or why they should make it. I'm not really sure how to solve this issue though, since it's part of a larger question of why should anyone pay to host a server to begin with. I mean currently nobody is incentivized to maintain a server that costs a significant amount of money, so why should anyone try to attract new users?