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Comment by phreack | Hacker News Reader

So instances are like subreddits? Having never used Mastodon I'm not entirely sure I understood what an instance is, but if they are just like subreddits then I'd say that's a way better elevator pitch than trying to define them, and it also helps to show that people do like to congregate on a large platform around topics.

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It's a decentralized, federated, network. So choosing an instance I guess is more like choosing an IRC server.

Or picking between Gmail and Hotmail, or any other e-mail service. Livejournal or Blogger. It's no coincidence the examples I can think of seem slightly old hat, because these things have been out of fashion for a while. They need to involve the blockchain somehow if they want it to seem modern.

Kiiiind of, but there's quite some general instances. Most of them are more like a "here's some people interested in the same subjects as you". So yes, on my (politically motivated, I guess) instance I find quite some people with the same political slant (and some commentary on that), but many cats, daily stories, etc. Just like twitter or other platforms. It's worth a try seeing what joinmastodon.org tells you, and have a look.

Now I see. I looked around and it seemed hard to choose 'the right instance' to begin, knowing nothing about the platform. Most had esoteric names, like clubs. It might be a nice idea for Mastodon advocates to create general topic instances, that may feel more approachable for newcomers.

In any case, it does seem like a great platform and might blow up in time with few changes in the onboarding process

>It might be a nice idea for Mastodon advocates to create general topic instances, that may feel more approachable for newcomers.

Yeah, the instance names are often quite silly, but there's silly people on there. I mean 3000 variations of "mastodonUKsocial.com" or something wouldn't really tell you all that much more. If you don't want to go to mastodon.social, the biggest english language instance, octodon.social is a good, smaller (~11k users) general instance with a good vibe. Fwiw i think a lot of people use twitter to follow 'their kind of people' (lgbt groups, open source fans, music people) and this codifies those groups a bit more into proper instances/servers/communities, while of course allowing you to follow other people.

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