I've been intending to for a while, but felt locked in since some folks I never got a way to IM with them when they stopped using AIM or I had no PGP or Signal for, so while they're not encrypted at rest it was at least better than plaintext.
I never was an IRC user, I'm from what I term the "vBulletin era". Folks were super adamant I shouldn't be writing malware, building botnets, or siphoning up large swathes of credit cards and selling them to the Russians... but then they'd never connect me with anything except a PhD, the FBI, the CIA, or some other... agency.
That sort of annoying obstructionism is why I bounced around a lot in my 20s, then loudly declared they're gonna nuke DC, not Pittsburgh, and moved back to 412.
Anyways, I can't tell you how Mastadon is, socially. But I can tell you that the folks who were on Twitter when I joined it with the pormanteau of my first and last name I also stupidly used on a video game forum when I was 11ish to ask for help... I thought we were all on the same page about not showing up in what was obviously a public facing account and interacting in the same way you would on Facebook, which was, at least for me, always a walled garden -- I'd blocked a few family members and the intent was nothing went out to the public internet, as well as quite obviously a personal account.
Anyways, the short version is if you just want to have technical discussions, I've heard it's decent, but I have no idea how they navigate the ever present issue in online communities of sea lions[1] who have the same interactions over and over, waiting for you to respond in a way that gives them more cause to complain.
Like, at one point this week someone knocked on my door, and I had to politely remind them I'd asked them not to come into my apartment building without permission, then I wanted to say how about I throw you out the window if being politely asked not to come in here doesn't work... but despite that being a perfectly legal thing to say to someone who is trespassing -- or to just do it -- to just grab someone, throw them down the stairs, then throw them straight out the back door, possibly injuring or killing them along the way.
There's a type of person, on Twitter, who reads stuff like the above then has an absolute fit if told well gee, if reading something dontbenebby posted on Twitter scared you then... don't.
I guess I could file an appeal or something, but this has been a problem all they way back to when the folks who'd make a show of not giving you detention for standing up for yourself as they stat raped their way across the county... someone obtains an unpaid volunteer position they're only energized enough to do because they're a privlidged white man (or woman) -- then abused their access to that position to keep folks from expressing ideas they don't like.
(And I know that sounds Qanon-y -- I'm talking about ideas like "I'm not a communist, I'd be part of one of the largest political parties in a country like Germany and conflating the two is fascist".)
Anyways TLDR: Mastadon might be cool, but it might be better to just lurk for a bit OP