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!
My sibling’s delightful ex-roommate–a conservative, 20something, middle-class, cishet white man–said that he feels very oppressed in their college town! He’s always scared of saying what he thinks bc then everyone will think of him badly! Literally the most oppressed! (His actual words)