p.s. The guide linked in the original post answers lots of questions about this topic and gives advice on where to move, how to move etc.

Don't just join a random server though, try to choose one from a curated list of reliable servers such as joinmastodon.org/servers or fedi.garden

There are lots of reliable servers on here that have been running for years, for example you can see some good servers listed by founding date at fedi.garden/servers-sorted-by-…

Servers

Find where to sign up for the decentralized social network Mastodon.

^{joinmastodon.org}

25%? Kinda explains why there's so many arseholes there

Please don't spread them out!

I disagree, they aren't harder to defederate (not that I'm defederating with mastodon.social).

I've heard of several instances defederating with them, though. It's not the end of the world if you do.

If I defederate mastodon.social most active accounts will probably leave climatejustice.social, because otherwise they lose up to 25% of accounts they interact with.

If I don't block mastodon.social I'll continue having to put about the same amount of time, maybe more, in moderating their accounts, than their whole mod team does. But they get payed by Mastodon GmbH, I don't.

Servers with more than 2000 monthly active members should close registrations automatically.

Or Mastodon should pay every Fediverse moderator a living wage.

I landed on mindly.social when I joined and it's a great place.

Here's what the landing page says about this space:

"About Mindly.Social
Mindly.Social aims to be a friendly, non-topic specific community focused on spreading positivity, expanding your knowledge and experiences, and just being plain old happy on social media for once."

I'm new to Mastodon this week and I self-hosted a single-user instance. Glad to hear I'm helping protect the Fediverse, as well as having lots of fun theming and customising! 💜 💫

#Fediverse #JustJoinedMastodon #FOSS #SelfHosted

thanks for talking about this. the community needs to be actively involved in keeping a network decentralized if they want to reap the benefits of decentralization.

Good thing moving to another server can even be done on here. Things look so bleak in this regard outside the Fediverse. (bluesky might have this functionality but no one runs servers other than bsky.social)

Larger servers also tend to have worse moderation

What does that mean, exactly?

are harder to defederate, threatening safety.

nonsense.

My friend, I believe you are wrong about this — though I do not question your sincerity or your noble intentions. We've had this disagreement before, and I am so bummed that you're still launching these unfair and inaccurate attacks.

More significantly, I question (again) your using the @fedi.tips account – which many people naturally assume is an official and impartial and 100% solid source — which it *is* mostly, except for this one strange blind spot — for a personal vendetta.

@tomjennings

Mastodon.social used to regularly close to new members and redirect people to register on another long-running reliable server. Maybe they could go back to doing this in some form or another?

More and more I see the value in running your own instance. I haven't tried with the Mastodon software yet, but #gotosocial was shockingly easy (for someone with a fair amount of linux experience anyhow) to get online in a tiny VPS.

I set it up to collect online writing I wanted to save while deleting Blog, FB, Twitter, LJ, Reddit, etc. Mostly longer-format stuff, and I was able to set post length to 12000 to accommodate some of the larger pieces.

We knew it would be harder to defed the longer things went on so we just cut the cord and never looked back. Defederating m.s cuts down on administration work by at least 40% in my experience, but I'm sympathetic to servers that can't because they have members whose incomes depend on being seen by more users :( It sucks that other instances have to do m.s's moderation for them, basically.

In addition to the many good reasons you listed to stay away from m.s, the fact that it is big enough to be an attractive sales prospect adds to the risk that users will have to move anyway if Gargron hands the keys to someone objectionable. We've seen this happen with every social media platform ever and I hope not to see it on the fedi, but the bigger and more valuable m.s gets the likelier it becomes.

I was going to start on an art mast but i didn't want to post my art because I hear fedi hasn't been good about protecting artists from scraping.

As a new user I wasn't sure if I was able to see the rest of mastedon, I kind of get how it works a little better now

never understood moving. all you do is make an account elsewhere and use that account. can import w/e old stuff you want. have about a dozen rn. if one gets too noisy I filter or quit visiting until things settle down. several have gone away like mozilla.social. no big loss. don't really ever want old posts. maybe pictures. posts delete after a few weeks, which is probably for the best.

instance sorting; fediverse.observer/

If you're going to move, do it early. It's easy to move but you can't move the posts you've already made. So you lose your history.

Feature request. Migrate your history when moving servers.

I concur! Fully intend to move along but haven't had the time to hunt down a new home. Soon!

I will hate to lose my early "joined on" date, and the getting the early experience for brand-new features.

But I should do it and maybe move somewhat often so I retain familiarity with how to do it, so I'm easily mobile.

I did a migrate for a less-used biz identity and it was very smooth and painless, I must say.

@luca

I totally understand, and it's fine to direct new people to a "default" server so they don't get overwhelmed with choice.

The problem is if that default is the largest server, because it centralises the network and puts it in danger.

If JoinMastodon and the official apps could direct new people to another reliable server (and then rotate this default regularly) this would solve most of the problems.

That kind of default rotation is how Nextcloud's onboarding works, for example.