As with many Twitter users, I'm finally at the point where I want to leave and join Mastodon. About a year ago I set up an account after seeing some people on Tildes talk about it, but I found it confusing and ultimately closed the account. I want to give it another go, but I'm a bit confused about all the different instance options, what the practical differences are, and more. Are there any comprehensive getting started guides? Does it matter which instance I join? How did you choose for yourself?

A few years ago when I was new to tildes a typed tildes.com directly in the URL bar. I realized I'd forgotten the correct domain extension and did a web search for "tildes community" or something similar.

One of the results was for tilde town . At the time I glanced over it and thought about joining but I never got around to it. Last July I somehow stumbled over it again and this time I applied to join.

It's a pretty cool place.

The idea is that it's a Linux server that each user gets an account on. You then ssh into it - and that's where the community lives!

They have a chat system, a forum system, microblogging that's private to that community, command line games (some of which are multi-player) and a bunch of other really neat features. Each user even gets a folder in their home directory that let's them serve up public web pages.

Technically they have about 2,000 registered users, but the number of actual active users seems to be similar to our community here.

The vibe reminds me a lot of what we have here except that tilde town is casual "slice of life" only and doesn't do news articals at all. Some of their forum posts are similar to our own, with posts for what people are reading and watching and what projects they are working on.

Ive enjoyed my time there so far and I'd encourage any one who's interested to check it out. My username over there is grendel84, stop by and say hi!