19
votes
Which Mastodon instance should I use?
I was thinking about joining Mastadon but I'm not really sure what instance I should choose. It's all a bit confusing to me.
I was thinking about joining Mastadon but I'm not really sure what instance I should choose. It's all a bit confusing to me.
Doesn't matter too awful much. Like email, (almost) all instances freely cross-talk with each other. Just find one that you like that suits you and go for it. What are your interests? Would you like a very lively insane local timeline (high population server) or a more cozy one?
This isn't wrong, but it's also not entirely right. Without wishing to get too bogged down in technicalities: saying that all instances freely cross-talk is not correct, and is like suggesting that all subreddits on Reddit freely interact or all Discord servers do: in theory they can, in practice they don't (not to mention Mastodon specifically allows instances to block out others)
Mastodon instances are founded, and often curated for, specific interest groups and follow their own internal rulesets. Some instances like mastodon.social are global "catch-all" instances while others like Fosstodon cater more to a specific crowd, or instances like awoo.space who operate on an instance whitelisting principle rather than blocking offending instances.
And that's another kind of important distinction: mastodon operates on both a "local" and "federated" timeline system, so choosing your instance means choosing a specific "local" timeline, if people are looking for other like-minded people to follow and do not want to deal with the general noise of the federated timeline choosing the right instance can help a lot.
That's exactly why I put that "(almost)" there. I didn't figure a newbie just looking for an instance needed to know most of that right off the bat. It's good info but it's kind of inner-working type stuff, except the local vs federated timelines which is pretty good to know about.
I'd probably like to use the main one. Is there a main one?
that's sorta the point in that there isn't rly :P mastodon.social is the one that mastodon official maintains afaik, but it's only like the jumping off point. this might be helpful for ya tho
Mastodon.social is the sort of "flagship" instance run by the creator of Mastodon. It's got pretty reasonable rules, is probably the single largest instance out there, and is a pretty good general instance. People who just want to get on Mastodon and not worry about "instances" too much often go there.
I settled on mastodon.host, and I'm happy with it. It's a smaller instance (at times too quiet) but I wanted that over something like mastodon.social which was way too noisy for me. I also didn't want an instance that was too focused on a singular thing (e.g. tech, anime, etc.). mastodon.host also ups the character limit from 500 to 2048, which is nice if you're wordy.
Regardless of which one you join, say hi when you do!
I'm a pretty big fan of niu.moe, personally. We're the friendly weeb instance.
You should pick one based on your interests, because the only thing that changes from instance to instance is your local timeline. For example, mastodon.technology is for tech talk while mastodon.social is more like Twitter. Doesn't matter which one you'll pick, they all interact just the same.
I use https://mastodon.sdf.org. SDF has many stuff (shell accounts, email, www or gopher hosting with optional CGI, ...) along with Mastodon. I had joined for a shell account some time ago, and when it got an instance of its own, jumped on it.
It is not free tho, there is a one time $5 payment for all feature (basic plan).
Here is a survey of Tildes' mastodon users where we shared our IDs, where you can find which communities ~ prefer.
I use chaos.social which is centred around the Chaos community
nihilist.space