Governments have been PAYING to inform the public via commercial services for… ever? And requiring citizens to do the same. Have you ever seen a public notice in a newspaper? At least posting on Twitter is free (for now).

It’s called docker. Linuxserver.io offers very close to “mastodon in a box”. https://hub.docker.com/r/linuxserver/mastodon

I use Unraid as my host OS with a Windows 11 gaming vm. If you say at my computer you would never know it’s not native. I can shutdown/reboot windows and it doesn’t affect any of my home server applications, including a mastodon instance.

Someone on your instance needs to be following for it to get pulled into “all” on your instance. On a large instance that might be rather “all” encompassing, but it’s an important distinction. On a fresh single-user instance “all” will contain zero posts.