I can't tell from your profile: what server are you on
You can tell that from the URL: mastodon.social. Yes, that's a URL -- a fair chunk of Mastodon is under the .social TLD.
and would you recommend it for me?
Less clear, now that I understand the lay of the land a little better. The upside of the Fediverse is that it's very distributed across lots of friendly little servers, each of which has its own attitude and style. The downside is that yeah, wow -- that's a lot of servers to choose from.
mastodon.social is the oldest and biggest of the servers. That makes it the easiest choice, but not necessarily the best, and lots of folks recommend not using it as your home base. That's for several reasons:
Since so many people have been jumping into it lately, it's been struggling a little with the load.
Since it is so huge, the local "what's new" page isn't very interesting -- it's a rapid stream of posts in various languages, on every possible topic, most of them irrelevant to me. The nice thing about the smaller and more focused servers is that the Local page is often very interesting: when the server only has hundreds of members, who you share some bond with, it can be both practical and enjoyable to sometimes just see everything that folks are saying.
There are some folks who claim that mastodon.social, being so large, is less well-moderated and too open to the "bad" servers. OTOH, other folks deny both of those claims, and I haven't observed any problems myself yet.
("Bad servers" -- one thing about the Fediverse is that, by design, it is a truly free-speech zone when considered in its entirety: rules of moderation are 100% a local decision. The unsurprising consequence is that there are some utterly vile servers out there. But also by design, servers are allowed to filter or entirely block content from other servers. Which ones get blocked is also a local decision, and different communities are more or less strict about that.)
On the plus side, it's not necessarily a permanent decision: the Mastodon ecosystem explicitly allows you to move your account, with all of your followers, to another server. You can't transfer your content, but so long as your old server is reasonably stable and you leave breadcrumbs in both directions that doesn't seem to be a tragic problem.
At some point, it wouldn't surprise me if I move elsewhere; I just haven't found the ideal place for me yet. (Which would probably be a broad-based geek-oriented server, queer-friendly and fascism-hostile. It probably exists, but most of what I've found so far seems to be a little more narrowly focused.)
So mastodon.social isn't a bad starting place; it appears to be quite common to start there and move elsewhere. It's probably worth scanning instances.social, which provides a little bit of filtering for you, to see if something right jumps out, but the list is still impressively huge.
I have longer thoughts about current events that I intend to wrangle into a post of my own instead of scattering comments on everyone else's journals.
Yep, me too. Between the events over at Twitter and those at Adobe (the Pantone disaster), I think folks are starting to take a harder look at the consequences of the corporate conquest of the Web, and the virtues of the more "classic" philosophies...
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Date: 2022-10-30 09:30 pm (UTC)You can tell that from the URL: mastodon.social. Yes, that's a URL -- a fair chunk of Mastodon is under the .social TLD.
Less clear, now that I understand the lay of the land a little better. The upside of the Fediverse is that it's very distributed across lots of friendly little servers, each of which has its own attitude and style. The downside is that yeah, wow -- that's a lot of servers to choose from.
mastodon.social is the oldest and biggest of the servers. That makes it the easiest choice, but not necessarily the best, and lots of folks recommend not using it as your home base. That's for several reasons:
("Bad servers" -- one thing about the Fediverse is that, by design, it is a truly free-speech zone when considered in its entirety: rules of moderation are 100% a local decision. The unsurprising consequence is that there are some utterly vile servers out there. But also by design, servers are allowed to filter or entirely block content from other servers. Which ones get blocked is also a local decision, and different communities are more or less strict about that.)
On the plus side, it's not necessarily a permanent decision: the Mastodon ecosystem explicitly allows you to move your account, with all of your followers, to another server. You can't transfer your content, but so long as your old server is reasonably stable and you leave breadcrumbs in both directions that doesn't seem to be a tragic problem.
At some point, it wouldn't surprise me if I move elsewhere; I just haven't found the ideal place for me yet. (Which would probably be a broad-based geek-oriented server, queer-friendly and fascism-hostile. It probably exists, but most of what I've found so far seems to be a little more narrowly focused.)
So mastodon.social isn't a bad starting place; it appears to be quite common to start there and move elsewhere. It's probably worth scanning instances.social, which provides a little bit of filtering for you, to see if something right jumps out, but the list is still impressively huge.
Yep, me too. Between the events over at Twitter and those at Adobe (the Pantone disaster), I think folks are starting to take a harder look at the consequences of the corporate conquest of the Web, and the virtues of the more "classic" philosophies...