I’m thinking about joining mastodon, but I don’t know what server to go with, and the list of servers seems to have very little information about each. Right now I think I’ll open an account on mastodon.social.
I’d prefer a server with a high character limit and that has access to most other servers.
I’d say go for mastodon.social, you can always move if you later find one you like more.
I tried to find one that kind of aligned with my interest and didn’t have a crazy number of users like mastodon.social. Reading online about picking instances, the recommendation to pick a smaller instance came up numerous times.
Went with sunny.garden since it’s a creative/artsy/tech instance and it’s been great. My local feed moves at a decent pace with content I enjoy, but I could also see mostly everything else on the federated tab.
host your own if you care about privacy
https://c.im has 5000 characters limit.
https://kolektiva.social (anarchist) has 10 000
https://infosec.exchange has 11 000 characters and formatting.
https://qoto.org has 65 535 character limit and other features, but some servers (including Universeodon and main British one - mastodonapp.uk) block it.You also can’t follow hashtags on qoto.org
Asked a few qoto users, you actually are able to add a hashtag view as another column.
You can still decide to transfer your account later on, so starting on mastodon.social isn’t too bad. https://guide.toot.as/guide/move-mastodon-server/#1-guide-configuration Even if i would suggest to change it, as it kind of beat the decentralization aspect to it, i believe ~80℅ users are just on this default instance. The official website has it’s own list of suggested servers per interests and some rules here : https://joinmastodon.org/servers You can search via a minimum maximum character limit here : https://mastodon.help/instances/en
By default, Mastodon servers can access all other servers. It’s just the admin who can decide to block other instances on a blacklist for all the users on the instance they use. You can also just block yourself instances or users if you want. As long you don’t take a political, shitposting, or fascist one which are often blocked on a lot of instances.
