this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2023
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Asklemmy
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The best Mastodon instance is the one that aligns with your interests and values the most.
Why? When you're looking for new content, and new people to follow, the local and federated timelines of your instance are a good way to do so. Your home timeline includes all the people and hashtags you followed yourself, and their boosts. The local timeline includes all the posts and boosts of everyone on your instance. The federated timeline has all the content that everyone on your instance is following. (Of course you can always follow anyone you like, but I'm making a point about ease of discovering content relevant to you here.)
For this reason, just joining a big, general-purpose is less useful, since you're just going to get a hodge-podge of random things in these timelines. Perhaps you don't mind, but I feel like it's good to point out this feature of the fediverse, as some people might not know, or realize this is a thing.
How? Okay, of course this is silly to recommend without giving you some way to look for these instances. There's a couple of directories that allow you to search for them. Looking for some briefly came up with https://instances.social/, https://mastodon.help/instances and https://mastodonservers.net/. Also note you can migrate your account from one instance to another, taking your followed content and even followers with you.
This is the answer.
When I first joined, I had no idea what I was doing so I just joined mastodon.social. Unfortunately, I struggled to find discussions/content that interested me and there was also no Local feed, so it just felt empty and impersonal. After a short while, I just stopped using it.
Fast forward six months and after using Lemmy for a few weeks, I finally have my head around this Fediverse thing and decide to have another crack at Mastodon. This time, I searched around and found a smaller instance that is more aligned with my interests and straight away felt at home. Such a different experience this time around!
So yeah, the TL;DR is to shop around for a server that 1) you like the feel of, and 2) has a Local feed to make it easier to get involved with topics that are relevant to you, IMO.