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Searchable List of Mastodon Servers

instances.social

148 pointsvyrotek154 comments

This highlights why I’m so far not on Mastodon: Decision fatigue.

How do I find a server that ‘matches’ me but doesn’t make me seem like an over-enthusiastic single-issue or single-hobby dedicant - and also isn’t run by someone whose (perhaps currently unespoused) views I’d find problematic?

Maybe I should just join what seems to be the default (because of its friendly domain?) of http://mastodon.social. But that seems defeat the purpose of decentralization - and (without evidence) I don’t really trust that mastodon.social is set up to handle the huge influx of users at the moment…

This is 100% why I haven't signed up yet. It's like walking into a blockbuster video and being told, "you can pick one movie from this store, but everyone will know which movie you pick, and the director of that movie will be able to control what other movies you get to see."

The analysis paralysis this induces is incredible.

> and the director of that movie will be able to control what other movies you get to see

That’s not true though, is it?

Aren’t you able to consume content from anywhere else in the fediverse?

You can unless an admin specifically blocks another instance. It doesn't seem to be that common in practice (other than blocking the content that you'd expect to be blocked or, IIRC, a handful of servers that effectively de-federate).

It is more like you previously could -only- obtain movies from Blockbuster and you loved that they recommended sponsored movies whenever you visited. You did not have to think.

Now Blockbuster is gone and there are a pile of other ways to obtain movies out there and you are complaining that choosing one is hard. It is entertainment and they all have access to the same movies so it is not that important of a choice.

You and a lot of other people. I see this blind spot in the open source community from time to time regarding decision paralysis and I'm surprised that more people don't realize how much of an issue it is for a lot of users.

I don't want to think about what server I'm on. I want the whole thing to just work. The fact that there is only one Twitter and only one Facebook are actually advantages in the marketplace for those services.

> I don't want to think about what server I'm on.

Maybe I’m the exception but for me almost without exception the answer is that I want to run my own instance.

What’s the point of leaving a centralized system for a decentralized one if you still let someone else own your data?

People aren't mass-leaving Twitter because Twitter owns their data. They were happy with someone else owning their data to the extent that they were users of Twitter. They're mass-leaving Twitter becomes Elon Musk bought Twitter. Elon Musk cannot buy Mastodon. He might buy your particular server, but the chances he'd try to are much more remote because the benefit of doing so is much less.

Agreed. I've been pasting this anywhere I see the frustration

Think of it like your phone number, it's a service and you need a provider. Choose one by location https://umap.openstreetmap.fr/en/map/mastodon-near-me_828094 makes no difference, they all talk to each other and you can move servers at any time

And it's curated for servers that are open for registration so hopefully no dead ends

Totally this. Did decision fatigue stop you from using email? It didn't because they all talk. It doesn't really matter which you choose.

This is especially true now that there is an official system to change/move servers.

I've been using Mastodon on and off for a few years now and the thing that bugged me was that the benefits it was pushing at first were absolutely uninteresting to me as a user: it's decentralized and you can pick your server. Those aren't exactly things a general user is going to care about or even understand. They just want to know how to sign up and follow interesting people. The fact that there wasn't any trending (or usable search) for a while made it also feel like a ghost town. You create your new account and look around and think, "Okay, where's the activity?" I suppose it wasn't really meant to be twitter, so my criticisms may not be entirely fair.

you pick your server and see if they approve your account too. This was an issue that I encountered. I made accounts on a couple different instances but didn't make it through their approval process and had no idea why.

Should just lead with advice "CHOOSE THE FIRST YOU LIKE AND CHANGE IT LATER".

Opine:

The "tell me what to think" motivation is frustrating from multiple perspectives:

- overt bias of the Tellers is rife with unethical potential

- low engagement of the Users is a part of communication, it's reality and why the style of Exciting Content (insert emojis) has become popular in modern communication vs the 'respectably formatted and spell-checked' of yesteryear

Do you get decision paralysis when deciding what home to buy or what apartment to live in?

This is what freedom looks like, vs going to a defacto centralized megacorp and having them tell you where to live so that they can most efficiently manipulate and spy on you for profit.

Everyone has become far too accustomed with exploitative corpos telling them what to do on the internet. Choices are harder, but healthier.

Just make a choice, and you can make a different one later.

When you move because you don't like the instance anymore, how do all of your connections follow you?

This, to me, is the central problem in the Fediverse.

> When you move because you don't like the instance anymore, how do all of your connections follow you?

You use the built-in[0] migration feature. Create an account on your new instance, point it at your old one. Then point your old account to your new one.

[0] Built in to Mastodon, anyway. YMMV with other Fediverse software.

And if the instance-administrator on the old account decides they don't like you and drops the account or points it to /dev/null?

That risk exists at everything you do not host yourself on the internet.

The risk is very small for email when you own your own domain. One can switch "instances" at will with just a DNS update.

You can do this with Mastodon too. Point a domain at one of many managed mastodon services or host your own.

> Do you get decision paralysis when deciding what home to buy or what apartment to live in?

Yes, of course. That involves a mortgage, location, the logistics of moving...

Do you get decision paralysis when deciding what home to buy or what apartment to live in?

Yes! Doesn’t everyone to some degree? That’s a huge decision that takes me days to decide.

Just make a choice, and you can make a different one later.

If we’re going with a housing analogy, this is pretty terrible advice. But I don’t think the housing analogy really applies. Where someone lives says (in my mind) a lot less about them - but is also a much more important personal decision.

You’ve implied a few times in this thread that complaints about Mastodon are because people are somehow accustomed to being told what to do by corporations. That is quite hyperbolic, and I also don’t really think it’s true.

I don’t see how caring about what a public choice appears to say about me has anything to do with that.

Decisions can be big but still easily reversible. And it makes sense to not hesitate with those, I think.

That is indeed something I've applied to buying an apartment in the past. I bought an apartment and ended up not liking it too much, so I sold it and bought a different one a few years later. Now I'm thinking about selling it again and buying something in a different part of the world. I don't see why making a choice and making a different one later is bad advice here.

Of course, there are choices that are difficult to reverse. Then some hesitation makes sense in my opinion.

Exactly. Think hard about marriage or a tattoo. A mastodon server? Who has time to stress about that. Pick anything and pick another one later.

That would be easier, of course, if your name followed you.

Mastodon could probably use a directory service independent of the network service.

When you move mastodon servers your followers and follows go with you to your new username so yous name kind of does follow you.

It is a bit like snail mail forwarding address.

I agree a directory server is probably a good call. It proved to be useful in Matrix.

I drove to the bay area on a Friday, looked at three apartments on a Saturday, and moved in Monday.

When I was ready to buy a home, I looked at one, made an offer, and bought it.

Life is a lot easier when you know your practical success criteria and are decisive when something meets it.

I truly think most people today are too accustomed to letting algorithms live their lives for them.

> How do I find a server that ‘matches’ me but doesn’t make me seem like an over-enthusiastic single-issue or single-hobby dedicant

Just don't care about it that much, really. My main account has been at https://functional.cafe for years now, but I'm posting about pretty much everything there: programming, music, art, politics, current events, shitposting.

> and also isn’t run by someone whose (perhaps currently unespoused) views I’d find problematic?

Ask someone from your friend circle who's already on Fediverse, but also see the above point.

Just don’t care about what the first thing people will see that’s specifically about me says about me? I don’t think I can bring myself to do that.

Then signing up for a general instance (mastodon.social, mas.to, etc.) makes sense. It's like (as in exactly like) signing up for gmail vs. having a custom domain.

https://mastodon.social/ isn't allowing new signups, https://mas.to/ is returning a cloudflare error page for me.

It's an exceptional growth period for the servers. Twitter used to have failwhales, and gmail used to require invitations. It will stabilize. (And, if you happen to be interested and have the skillset, you could deploy your own instance. I wouldn't be surprised if there's already a VPS provider that already has pushbutton mastodon deployment in place.)

So, it's exactly like signing up for gmail if gmail was down and you had to either wait for them to fix it at some undetermined point in the future, find another email provider or set up your own email server instead.

Much of the history of the Internet has been exactly like that. New services (or new-you-you) constantly going down with an influx of new users, services (like email) that allow anyone to set up their own machine ... this mild and temporary inconvenience is familiar. A week from now it will be fine.

But I think that's the important point. Right now, there's nothing wrong with Mastodon. Mastodon is working fine. A couple of servers that people commonly encounter first are having growth issues. But those servers aren't Mastodon any more than Gmail is email.

Well, I would say it's a problem that a lot of people are trying to join the fediverse and it's currently quite difficult and confusing to do so.

I would further say there's a marketing problem that Mastodon advocates keep saying this situation is normal, expected and it's working fine, which is obviously quite offputting.

It is a community project, there isn't a centralized marketing message or anything like that. If the community is growing as fast as their servers can handle it, that seems like a fine situation?

I sincerely hope it can conquer its current growth and signup issues and the unnecessary reputational damage inflicted by its advocates.

> A couple of servers that people commonly encounter first are having growth issues. But those servers aren't Mastodon any more than Gmail is email.

And that's what a lot of tech people don't get, to normies actually Gmail does equal Email and such. You're not going to get the bulk of everyday people on these platforms until you think in their shoes and provide features (and don't have downtime on your main servers) that fit their experiences.

> to normies actually Gmail does equal Email and such

I'd love to hear of some evidence for that. I've never encountered anyone assuming that the bit after the @ has to be gmail.com, or being unclear and uncertain if they can communicate between their work Outlook account and their home Gmail account. This feels very much like someone's taken the idea "to most people, the internet just is the web" and run wild with it.

My point stands Mastodon has a bad UX and no one I know wants to continue to use it. They were all pretty much immediately put off.

> So, it's exactly like signing up for gmail if gmail was down and you had to either wait for them to fix it at some undetermined point in the future, find another email provider or set up your own email server instead.

GMail was invite only for a very long time at the beginning fwiw

It's also exactly like when people on the right started leaving twitter and all these alternatives popped up.

And in the end, people (who left willingly) ended up back on twitter anyway just because people kept sharing things from there. But also because the alternative services could not keep up with the momentum, resulting in degraded service. So everyone seemed to collectively go "meh" and returned to twitter.

I predict everyone will be back on twitter once all this blows over, and especially if alternatives can't keep up. Uptime and reliability seem to be more important than features, freedom, or just about anything else.

Twitter used to have failwhales

I remember the failwhale days, but this is different.

Twitter is a VC-backed company that had the resources to build out their infrastructure.

Mastodon is a bunch of volunteer-run servers and it looks pretty obvious they aren’t going to be able to handle the infusion of new users… unless there’s an infusion of resources.

I’m on mastodon.social and it has slowed to a crawl, compared to what I was used to 6 months ago.

Also the UI/UX isn’t great. Say what you will about Twitter, but they’ve built a pretty slick web application and native apps. People used to the simplicity of Twitter are going to struggle, if the complaints on my Twitter timeline are any indication.

There is an infusion of resources. One option that seems common is that users aren't required to contribute towards hosting fees, but donations are easily accepted -- that is how the sustainable ones work from what I have seen. It seems to work pretty well?

It's very transparent, which I like -- "we got a bunch of new users, the server bill is going up $2k a month overall so if you can pitch in please do" is extremely clear and seems to work effectively. An individual server seems like it should be able to charge for hosting your account like with email if it needed to be operated like a business.

So far it doesn't really seem like it needs to operate like a business, it just takes longer for collectives of humans to respond to changes in needs than a giant enormously wealthy company that knew what would happen in advance. I'm sure it will equilibrate, it has the last two times this happened.

Mastohost offers fully-provisioned Mastodon hosting service:

<https://masto.host/>

Edit: And a few minutes after posting this, a wiki link showed up in my Masto stream with numerous suggestions and tips:

<https://joinfediverse.wiki/How_to_host_your_own_Fediverse_in...>

This problem is literally solved by OP. Search https://instances.social/list#lang=&allowed=&prohibited=&min... for the whole list of instances accepting signups, choose the most generic-sounding name, check it out, register there.

Did you see the list? Finding a "generic" instance that's open to signups honestly isn't easy, right now. I ended up on fosstodon.org, which is not as generic as I'd like but seemed like the least terrible option I could find in half an hour.

How do I ensure I’m not picking one that won’t, now or in a few days or weeks or months end up being associated with views I find problematic?

What I’m worried about is my reputation - what the server I’m associated with tells others about me (the argument that those others are wrong in making assumptions doesn’t comfort me).

These hazards are probably very unlikely, of course, but the alternative of ‘how about I just avoid all these hazards’ is the one my lizard brain is picking.

I think you’re worrying too much about this particular point. If it becomes noxious, migrate later.

what's more likely to happen is that the instance will go offline for some reason and never come back. We had this happen with an adult material related instance. It became brigaded by another crew who flooded it with very illegal material. The users were helpless to do anything but report it, and soon the whole instance was gone.

It was a very unfortunate and frightening view into what can quickly happen with the fediverse.

Dude who cares. Unless youre like a popular figure or something whose going to go through the list of users and be like oh this particular user happens to be signed up to this site along with tens of thousands of other users but Im gonna find this person and trash talk them

The same thing was true of Twitter which is why so many are leaving.

Unlike Twitter, you can leave a Mastodon server for another one and take your follows and followers with you.

If you want assurances that a server owner will never act against your will, you need to take the same action you would to mitigate a landlord acting against your will. Buy your own place.

In a decentralized universe you have to start thinking of servers as real estate. Nothing is free but if your goal is to get to share with you what they paid for for free, you take what you can get. Or buy your own server for only yourself, or share with others.

This is what the world looks like without tracking and advertizing trying to make everything seem free.

This is not at all obvious, but it's fairly easy to move your Mastodon account and leave a forwarding notice behind: https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/moving/

FWIW, most of us don't pay that much attention to it unless it's an instance with a very good or bad reputation, and even then, new users aren't really presumed to know what they signed up for.

If this is the best response hardcore fans of Mastodon can come up with, I don't have much hope.

You actually can't sign up on mastodon.social at the moment. I thought the same, all the instances are for weirdly specific groups I'm not in. You don't have this problem with email, there's no requirement to choose an email address that matches your political tendencies, sexual kinks etc.

I eventually chose fosstodon.org which seems like about the most vanilla thing that's open to new users and where I have a decent claim to being the right kind of person. I suspect a lot of people will look at the long list of furry-centric instances and conclude Mastodon is not for them. IDK, maybe that's considered a feature.

But it really is the same with mastodon. You don't need to find an instance that matches your political tendencies, furry niche, or whatever.

Just pick one that feels right. Maybe you are French or Korean and like a server in French or Korean, or maybe you feel very strong about politics: the make that a parameter. Otherwise just go for any "general" server.

Just like with email, people will generally just pick Hotmail, AOL, xs4all.nl, yahoo or email, without much thought. This is fine.

You can easily move later if you ever find a community that you wish to be part of.

> Otherwise just go for any "general" server

That's exactly what I tried, and failed, to do. As far as I was able to discover, including via the site being discussed here, there are no such servers currently available for new signups.

I'm sorry to hear that. The influx is big currently. Many servers can barely handle all the signups and extra load.

So this is temporary, and certainly not a fundamental issue.

Thank you! This is a much, much better response than the denialism I'm seeing in other replies.

I’m not convinced that this is a temporary issue - the mastodon servers seem to require relatively high upkeep (cost, cpu, and manual time) for relatively few users, which naturally leads to instances reducing/blocking new accounts and even just shutting down, which further exacerbates the load on other instances.

As I wrote in an earlier thread[1], this indeed is a problem. With mastodon.

But as numerous people replied, many alternatives are ready or wip. Many of them make hosting really easy. Since that thread I tried several. Gotosocial being my favorite, now.

So this too isn't fundamental. Because 'mastodon' is about much more than this one piece of software. It's a network, the fediverse. And you can easily host a near 1-1 mastodon alternative today on a cheap, VPS.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33120136&p=2#33120419

You're overthinking it. Find an instance that seems friendly and sign up. If it turns out you don't like it there, you can migrate to another one; barring defederation issues, everyone who is following you on the old instance will follow you on the new one automatically. Unfortunately the list of people that you follow isn't automatically migrated, but some front ends reduce the pain of this by letting you export a list of follow-ees on the old instance and then import it on the new one.

Just do it!

That's such a strange piece of UX. As a typical user, who on average consumes content rather than produces it, what I care about is that my list of followed accounts migrates with me so that my feed stays relatively consistent. As a content producer I would also care about my past posts migrating with me, which they don't. Having followers continue to follow me after migration is only the primary concern for the "influencer". I get that "my friends can still find me" is an important feature but who thought it was ok to skip the other two?

Followed accounts are easier to do manually; there's a simple export / import interface that existed before the account move feature.

I will note that for you "as a content producer" the uniformly reverse chronological presentation on Mastodon highly penalizes older posts (even a day old!) to an extent that is pretty rough to get used to, and that makes those older posts pretty irrelevant to move over. This is much like Twitter before its engagement-maximization algorithm days, though.

To me it's like the difference between living in an anonymous big city where I can do whatever I want without too many people yelling at me, and having to pick some village where everybody knows everybody and forces their rules on them. I would never choose the latter just by my own nature, so Mastodon will never be an alternative to twitter for me. Looking at that endless list of specialized echo chambers of some people with their own sub rules just makes me shudder immediately.

There are general servers that provide basically the same "anonymous in a big city" experience as Twitter (or at least, as much as Twitter did 10 years ago).

If you want to be on your own sovereign island you can host your own Mastodon instance or pay a monthly fee to one of the many Managed Mastodon providers and even use your own domain name.

It is not that much different from choosing an email provider.

I just want a public key. You can name me what you want or I can buy an easy-to-read username and renew it like a domain.

You have the choice to have any username you want on a domain you own.

*if you know how to manage and maintain a server

Or if you know how to pay someone else to do that for you.

I searched for managed mastodon and found plenty of options.

https://masto.host

https://toot.io

https://elest.io/open-source/mastodon

https://hostdon.jp/#/

https://federation.spacebear.ee/software/mastodon

https://ossrox.org/

https://weingaertner-it.de/

I expect many more will emerge now that demand is increasing.

The reason I just want a public key is because I don’t really own the account otherwise. I only own it if I self host it. If I rent from them, I’m just renting my account from these services. It’s actually worse than renting it from Twitter because people care less if smaller companies abuse you.

FYI: I had signed up years ago on mastoton.social and not really used it. I tried logging in a few days ago and it was struggling under the load. Sounds like the admin of that instance is buying hardware to support the new load.

You also can't:

- move your account to a different server

- use your account as a sign-on for other ActivityPub based services

- easily discover content that your server doesn't already know about

Your first point is wrong, you definitely can move your account to a new instance and take your followers with you.

https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/moving/#move The docs, for anyone wondering.

That just moves followers, not the account, data, followings, posts, reputations, links to your account, etc.

Moving the accounts you follow (and block/mute settings) is on that page under a different heading. Setting up a profile redirect is also on that page under a different heading. It is correct that moving posts/other data is not possible. "Reputations" isn't a thing technically attached to an account.

It doesn't matter ... too much.

I've been on Mastodon since 2016. I've switched instances twice, once when the instance was shut down (the maintainer gave several months' notice), once when instance ownership changed.

The first time was early enough that profile migration didn't exist ... and it still wasn't much of a deal. I follow a few hundred profiles, and am followed by about 2,000. It turns out that it's pretty easy to re-associate, at least for individuals. (Commercial / brand profiles with large follow/follower lists would have a different experience.) We reconnected pretty easily.

The more recent switch used profile migration. This brings along your followers / following lists, as well as block and mute lists, and is straightforward. Toots are not migrated, but for the most part Mastodon "lives in the present", and the back-catalogue isn't particularly significant. (I care more about this than most, and ... it's still not that big a deal.)

I actually have several active profiles, though all are forwarded to my primary active one: <https://toot.cat/@dredmorbius>. Again, if I need to fallback to another instance, I can.

Larger instances tend to be fairly anodyne. Smaller instances tend to fit niches, of both specific interests and policies. Pick something that looks reasonable. If you decide you want to change at a later date, it's not a big deal.

100% this!

There doesn't seem to be many general servers that:

1. I can trust won't just shut down in a week.

2. Are accepting signups

3. And won't end up having a negative stigma a in year when the creator goes off a deep end. I know I can just switch to another instance, but I really don't want to have to do that frequently.

Matrix at least solves this by just having an official Matrix home-server. Matrix is still federated, but if you just want to just sign-up and join a chat room, you're not forced to pick a home-server that's specific to you or worry about the factors above.

On Twitter I've seen a lot of criticism of the whole idea of "choose a server" when joining Mastodon (and the fediverse in general).

Instead of lists of servers, I wonder if a better onboarding workflow would be...

- What username do you want?

- What are your interests? (click, click, click)

- Backend checks availability of username on matching servers

- Pick one of these: @username@abc.social, @username@def.org, @username@xyz.social (with a description of the community associated with each result).

In my opinion this could make the process feel more like choosing an email address which, again in my opinion, could be more familiar than "choose a server".

That's actually a fantastic idea, and I assume that the main barrier to implementing this isn't a technical one, but the coordination problem of getting enough instance admins to opt-in to appearing on this system, and finding some neutral third party to maintain it (potentially the same people as run this instances.social site).

Splitting your user story into smaller tasks, it seems like the technical side could be implemented as follows:

- An agreed API / JSON format / microformat for instances to list the top 3 user interests that distinguish them from other instances (ideally using Wikidata Q identifiers[0], to create a consistent cross-language taxonomy) and maybe a paragraph of text to give a fuller description of the community

- An agreed API for checking whether a username is already taken on an instance (and maybe a standardised query string format supported by each instance, which allows a third party site to send their visitor to that instance in such a way that the visitor is presented with a sign-up page where the username box is already filled)

- A site with a neutral domain name like "join the fediverse . party" (or just re-use instances.social if that's catchy enough), with the UX you describe

- A way for new instance admins to submit their instance for inclusion (which triggers some automated checks like "is this instance online?" and "which parts of the fediverse does it federate with?")

Actually the hard part is probably preventing Sybil-attacks, since some attacker could create millions of dummy instances that have only one user on (though the instances will no doubt lie and claim to have billions of users). Maybe there does need to be some cabal or union of instance admins who can be trusted to give estimates for how many genuine users are probably on the smaller instances they federate with (reporting "0" or "negative infinity" for instances which they block).

[0] https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q43649390

https://instances.social/ already has a wizard that does a good chunk of this, though not, I believe, with username availability checking. There are a lot of different entry points and they don't all pursue the same polish, for better or worse.

Mastodon is interesting as like a lot of open-source projects it focuses on solving a technical problem over a user-experience problem. And it’s why, even if Elon drives Twitter into a ditch, like a Tesla on FSD, it’ll never become the replacement.

The problem being solved with Mastodon is ‘like Twitter but open source and without central control’. Federated! Decentralised! Instances!

Great for people who are interested in that sort of thing, but I can guarantee that most Twitter users couldn’t give two shits about any of that, just as they don’t care about Twitter’s infrastructure.

Things people do care about are ease of use (do I have to spend more time thinking about how to post than what to post?) and audience (are there things to see and will my stuff be seen?).

With Twitter the answers are clear, but with Mastodon the emphasis on solving a particular architecture problem has led to a host of usability issues that each add friction to the experience.

People who care about federation and ownership and all that may be willing to push through, but I’m not sure most would.

MD is irritating in the wrong ways, agreed. Federation functionality is cool and needs to be built upon.

Twitter is irritating in the right way. In addition to posts w/ multimedia it has "identity", threading, boosting, and manual+auto moderation.

Mastodon evokes feelings of "year of Linux desktop" in me. Yes, Linux is a great desktop but no, I don't think people are ready to just up and move.

Mastodon is probably great, but I don't think people are ready to move there.

It's a lot more usable than I thought it would be when I joined up. And it has a lot of features Twitter doesn't have that I really appreciate... The fact that I can use markdown is pretty great.

I don't think it will be for everybody... The federated discoverability is going to be a turnoff for a lot of individuals. But it's well cleared the bar of of "this will be constant pain if you sign up."

I don't think Linux desktop has had its "Windows might implode and randomly shut down in the next year" moment yet. I can kind of see why Mastodon is getting discussed here again.

Yeah, we don't have Nadella publicly screaming about how left-wing advertising execs are about to destroy Microsoft, begging celebrities for money, and laying off half the company with no warning. Twitter genuinely looks in need of replacement at the moment.

That's fair. Musk is throwing a truly monumental, once in a century scale meltdown.

It's not going to replace Twitter. It's just something else.

But you're wrong about people being ready to move there. It's added 230k users in the last week, and in the last 24 hours in particular growth has started to look a bit exponential with just under 70k users being added, ~3000ish an hour. Despite the biggest server (mastodon.social) being overwhelmed and not being able to take new users.

Growth right now is about as rapid as possible.

Nice! Will be cool to see if that's sustainable.

Another option: Sign up at masto.host for $6/mo and run your own instance, they rate that as good for up to 5 active users, so you could even invite some family or friends. I almost went that route, but someone I knew did that and invited me to join theirs. Review: It has been speedy.

https://masto.host/

Is it really too much to ask for people to host their own content on a cheap VPS?

Wouldn't that neatly solve the content moderation problem? You register your server on an index or two, and you choose what your server will publish and accept. Each user would be responsible for finding a hosting provider who doesn't have a problem with what you post, and problematic content reports would go right to the hosting providers. The indexers could basically be DNS for usernames.

The AWS free tier would cover 99% of people, and between VNC and web UIs, you wouldn't necessarily need them to ever touch a shell. Plus, requiring a reasonably consistent public IP address would help to cut down on bulk spam.

For sure it's too much to ask.

Get started on Twitter: 1. go to twitter.com 2. enter your name and phone number

Get started on Pleroma: https://docs.pleroma.social/backend/installation/debian_base...

Get started on Mastodon: https://docs.joinmastodon.org/admin/install/ [page 1 of 12]

For the full effect, do the install with an iPhone.

Does it sound elitist to say that maybe a small barrier to entry could make for better quality social networks? Especially if the tradeoff was giving users more creative control over their spaces?

I guess you wouldn't get billions in ad revenue that way, but your expenses could be miniscule, and isn't it possible that a rapacious profit motive is part of the core problem with Meta, Twitter, & co?

Or are there really too few people in the world who could figure out how to log into a <$5/mo cloud VM?

https://www.nngroup.com/articles/computer-skill-levels/

Almost a third of American adults can't achieve computer tasks comparable in difficulty to "delete an email message." Only about a third can manage tasks comparable to: "You want to find a sustainability-related document that was sent to you by John Smith in October last year."

"Is it really too much to ask for people to host their own content on a cheap VPS"

That is the most out of touch question I have ever read on the internet. It is hilariously ridiculous :)

I'm a professional developer with active AWS and DigitalOcean accounts and there's no way in hell I would spend time setting up my own mastodon instance. Can you imagine my tech illiterate cousin who likes to tweet about celebrity gossip doing this?

People hosting their own social media servers is pure delusion.

masto.host was an option yesterday, now it looks like it won't be an option for the next few days.

I was about to install self-hosted Mastodon but the machine load and amount of admin chores seemed too high. I've installed self-hosted Pleroma instead. Pleroma has 2% the DAU count of Mastodon, I'm starting to wonder if I'm missing out on the main experience, but I also don't want the main experience to be "server administration".

Should Mastodon fans just be phrasing this kind of choice as if it were email?

"You can have an email account on any number of servers, and you can send email anywhere, no matter where your account is."

"You can have a Mastodon account on whichever server you like, and you can follow people anywhere, no matter where your account is."

It just seems like a paradigm people already understand that might be more welcoming.

That seems like a really nice way to do it.

"You can sign up with one of these main instances and follow people no matter where their account is. If you find make a lot of friends in a specific corner of the Fediverse, or just want to switch to another instance, you can do so whenever you want."

And, to continue the email analogy [in response to all the "Just change servers if you don't like the one you signed up for"]

If you don't like your email provider, just change to a different one...

Oh yeah. And you'll lose all your previous emails. But we won't mention that.

Actually on Mastodon you can change servers and keep your followers and follows.

It has a built in mail forwarding process.

I don't think you can move your old posts, though, FWIW.

But it's an analogy intended to help with the server selection process; I don't think it has to be perfect.

You can use a script to download old toots and automatically repost them, backdated, to a new server. A lot of people do this when moving email servers.

In fact I've seen that analogy made many times on Mastodon in the last week.

Does this list include controversial instances that have been defederated?

The link is there, go try it and report back.

Not sure why this is light grey ("downvoted") -- it's a legit question.

I don't think it was downvoted because people think it's an illegitimate question, but because it's generally seen as an imposition on people's time to ask a question that could be readily answered by clicking through to the site in question and having a look. That is, after all, what anyone else would do in order to answer the question. (I didn't vote on this comment.)

Understood. I took it also as a statement, people seem to be up in arms about free speech and Twitter but from what I seen Mastodon will gladly announce their silencing of opinions which seem to be anything not democrat adjacent. As a squarely middle of the road voter why would I want to use something like Mastodon?

Edit: fuck it maybe I'll setup an instance for people similar to me and see what happens. I don't buy fully in to either side and it's hard to find social groups that feel similarly.

>Mastodon is one person

People really seem to completely miss the whole concept of a federated ecosystem, Mastodon is just a tool, like vBulletin, the whole point of it is that there isn't a "Mastodon" that announces things.

Unless I already know what instances to look for, how could I search for them?

  >it's generally seen as an imposition on people's time to ask a question that could be readily answered by clicking through to the site in question and having a look

That's not going to help anyone know if there are other Mastodon servers out there, which aren't on the list. Unless that person is already aware of the existence of said server in the first place.

Anyone remember when Gab had the biggest Mastodon instance by far, by user numbers, but all the Mastodon indexes were pretending it didn't even exist? The myth of the Fediverse as some libertarian promised land free from censorship and heavy handed control is just farcical.

Freedom of association is an essential part of freedom of speech, and is one of the core principles of libertarianism. One of the main features of Mastodon is that individual instances have the option to either federate with or reject other instances to curate the character of the community they want to build. Unlike Twitter, which puts everyone on a single instance, people on Mastodon can choose to be in a community of people with shared interests and values, hosted on an instance with rules that they agree with. The decentralization makes individual Mastodon instances more pleasant and less divisive to their users. Forcing instances to federate with others would be compelled speech, not free speech, and would take away from what makes Mastodon different from Twitter.

In the same way, forcing any website to list Gab would not be free speech. (Gab disabled federation, so it is not actually part of the fediverse anymore: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26012558.) Gab still exists as a service running on free and open source code derived from Mastodon because Mastodon is AGPLv3. Anyone who wants to sign up for Gab can just do that.

  >In the same way, forcing any website to list Gab would not be free speech...

I think you're being a bit disingenuous talking about "forcing" sites to list Gab. If individual instances wanted to de-link from it that was their perogative. But I was talking abuot sites which claim to provide indexes of what Mastodon servers are out there --ignoring the biggest one by a considerable margin, because they didn't like the politics of the people who used it.

I think if ypu're claiming to provide an index, it kind of behoves you to index everything you're supposed to be indexing. Not leave huge sections out because you don't like them. Imagine publishing a business directory where you didn't list the Jewish or black owned businesses... or printing a dictionary but leaving out all the words that began with a letter you didn't like.

Yes. No-one who believes in free speech should be "forcing" you to make good those omissions. But they're prefectly entitled to question the value of your 'publication' if you don't.

Gab is not an instance of Mastodon. It is a fork of Mastodon that has been modified to not interoperate with Mastodon instances and other fediverse services. Because of this, Gab is not part of the fediverse and has no place on instances.social.

If you want to create a list of social networks that includes Mastodon instances and Gab together, go for it. But there is no reason a list of Mastodon instances needs to include a service that is not a Mastodon instance.

I did not know that, I assumed gab was a regular instance. Thank you.

  >Gab isn't an instance of Mastodon.

It was in the past. Hence why I said [using past tense]...

  >Anyone remember when Gab had the biggest Mastodon instance by far...

As far as I remember the details, Gab forked Mastodon, after being effectively frozen out of the fediverse by all the other instances and indexes.

BTW --My politics are polar opposite to Gab's. But if you really believe in free speech, you shouldn't just defend it for people you agree with.

> As far as I remember the details, Gab forked Mastodon, after being effectively frozen out of the fediverse by all the other instances and indexes.

Gab, after its backend switch, has always been a fork of Mastodon instead of a stock implementation. Some Mastodon instances exercised their free speech (free association) rights by blocking Gab afterward, and some websites exercised their right to free speech by choosing not to mention Gab. Other Mastodon instances did not block Gab, and there were also websites that listed Gab alongside other fediverse services.

The owner of Gab later exercised his free speech rights when he decided to remove Mastodon's federation feature from Gab, turning Gab back to a single-instance monolithic social network like Twitter. By doing this, Gab exited the fediverse and no longer met the criteria for inclusion on websites that list fediverse services. Of course, there are websites that list social networks in general, which do include Gab.

> But if you really believe in free speech, you shouldn't just defend it for people you agree with.

Promoting or hosting content from Gab on a website is not a necessary condition for exercising free speech. This is because free speech includes free association, and website owners can opt to exercise their free speech rights by choosing not to promote or host content from Gab. The owner of Gab also exercised his free speech right by changing Gab to not interoperate with other Mastodon instances and fediverse services. As far as every party in this situation is concerned, the exercise of free speech has been upheld.

While it is no longer possible to host a Mastodon instance, it's still possible to create a website that lists Gab alongside anything you want. If none of the existing websites have the content you want to see, go ahead and exercise your free speech right to make one yourself.

Late edit: "While it is no longer possible to host a Mastodon instance" should be "While it is no longer possible to host a Mastodon instance that interoperates with Gab".

>The myth of the Fediverse as some libertarian promised land free from censorship and heavy handed control is just farcical.

I have problems controlling my snark at times, but this is how any libertarian idea should be viewed.

But also to counter that, why do people think that libertarianism encodes the right to an audience, and serving up convenience and an easy to use system (that's much more capitalism oriented). You're free to host your own mastodon server and connect with any server you like and that will accept you, and that the government has not right to block this communication.

Of course this is where I go back to disparaging libertarians as try to hold the opposing viewpoints of absolute property rights and that you should let them your server in defiance of your property rights.

I've seen a couple "free speech" instances in the list, yes.

I feel like the fact that there are different servers out there has made zero difference in how I use mastodon. I follow some people and that's it. I hardly ever view the local feed. I suppose the problem is I didn't really shop around for a specific server that matched my needs, but when you're starting out, what do you even know what you're looking for? And how do you know what difference it will even make?

Since it's supposedly 'decentralized', and this is HN, what are the downsides to just hosting a private ActivityPub instance and following people from there? Plus my account would not be tied to someone else's instance (since I can take my domain and vps with me).

yes, you can most certainly do that.

Yes (apart from the instances which operate on a whitelist basis for federation)

I do this, and more people should. People on huge multi-user instances are completely missing the point of federation.

The downsides are the usual sysadmin stuff that comes with running servers for anything. People also get excited about the instance-local timelines on multi-user instances, but again, that's completely missing the point.

I've run my own single-user instance since 2018 - the biggest downside is discoverability and community.

Discoverability: With other users on the instance the federated timeline is populated by posts from users that others on your instance follow, so you have to follow people a bit more liberally to discover other posts.

Community: Instances also have a local timeline, which shows posts from others on the instance and this gives each one a slightly different vibe. With a single-user instance it's just your posts!

But either way, you can still interact with pretty much anybody else in the Fediverse, and once you're followed by a couple of people your posts will go out to the federated timelines of other instances and you'll get interactions via that.

You can and should do this, if you have the time and energy to do so.

As other people have said, it's kind of scary to think about getting an account somewhere and not understanding that that "place" has a specific culture or political orientation that ends up making me a bad fit for it in a way I didn't understand.

And I guess imagine there are some potentially significant incentive problems about the way that instances talk about themselves and their communities.

How does the federation part work in practice when people run their own instances?

Most people don't (and won't) run their own instances, either because they lack the skills or resources (including time).

It would be best if you had users and followers to broadcast messages. Right now, mastodon feels like a ghost town. But who knows? There was a time when MySpace was king. Only time will tell ..

Also, Twitter works because of eyeballs. However, with so many Mastodon instances, people need to learn and find out who the real @nixcraft is. Sorry to say this, but I don't think so; we have an actual Twitter replacement right now. In another six months, someone might build it, or Elon will make it better or send it to /dev/null.

If you feel strongly about claiming the real nixcraft, you can host your own instance at nixcraft.com. or get one for approx the price of that infamous blue-check.

Only a person in control of nixcraft com can have an account like @nix@nixcraft.com.

Something extremely powerful and for free through federation. E.g. journalists or politicians who "require" a validated checkmark, would benefit from their company or party having an instance.

We don’t have the replacement for AOL either. We have the internet instead. Things evolve.

As for who the “real” @nixcraft is - how would I know it on Twitter ? The intuition is “first come first serve”, but you are one account hijack away from having to explain that actually @nixcraft is not the real one, despite claiming to be so, and actually @latest_nixcraft is the true yourself.

You would probably do so in the other places that people know you own: your website, your email sig, your GitHub account, your HN profile. Same as you are doing right now. (I checked only the HN profile)

With that method, what is the obstacle to adding the domain name after that handle ?

It's kind of weird to me to say that a platform with millions of users on it is a ghost town. I have both twitter and Mastodon accounts, and I find the opposite to be true. I have roughly the same number of followers on both platforms, and I find that I see far more interaction on Mastodon than I do on Twitter.

Doesn't feel like a ghost town to me? I've watched my feed explode in the last week though. Now I almost wish for a ranking algorithm.

You won't see jack shit until you start following people, though. It steadfastly will refuse to spoonfeed you. You have to manually curate your feed.

So it can feel a bit bare at first... But I think the last few years has shown the downsides of the "let me show you what I think you should like" approach...

230,000 new users in the last week, 68,000 of them just in the last 24 hours. Currently at about 30,000 posts per hour. (according to @mastodonusercount@bitcoinhackers.org). Growth throughout the week was averaging about 1000-1200 an hour, but in the last 24 hour that has double or tripled.

I am liking Mastodon a lot, and digging the general vibe and liking the smaller server I'm on. But can't help but feel that we're just a bit of time and marketing away from somebody "professional" coming along and creating a massive instance that federates into it, and tries to fill the Twitter niche more directly. Mastodon.social got overwhelmed, and it's interesting that there's nothing else to fill that niche of "I don't care which server, I just want to be where the crowd is"

Maybe some ex-Twitter employees should fork Mastodon and go from there?

I don’t understand what’s the point to this federation thing, other than to offer bad user experince. Shouldn’t “decentralized” be like the number 30 in the long list of things a popular/fun social platform should aspire for, not the number one?

I swear I’ve tried to find an instance but either the focus of the instance is too specific, has only couple dozen people, or doesn’t accept new members because there’s too much of them.

Mastodon was not made for the moment when Twitter collapsed. It was made as an alternative to (a fully working) Twitter for people who hated the toxic environment. So all of their marketing materials and onboarding process are geared toward helping the kinds of people who transition off Twitter to understand the benefits.

Now that Mastodon is being portrayed by the media as the escape hatch from Twitter for a broader audience, they'll probably start focusing more on making the onboarding process clearer and their marketing less techy-focused.

Yeah I understand that now. I’ve learned a lot about Mastodon in these days and it’s not that bad really. I just had this choice-paralysis as I had this idea that I’d have to pick ONE and that’s it. Kinda like if when joining Reddit you’d have to pick just one subreddit and stick with it.

The big revelation was that it doesn’t matter that much.

Filtering on policy is somewhat useful.

How long ago it launched, whether the software is up-to-date, uptime, latency, and what datacenter the server is running in would be signals of whether the sysadmin is serious about maintaining the server. (Weak signals, but better than nothing.)

Also, who is the admin? Are they anonymous?

On my third server now. After the first two stopped working, I decided to stick with mastodon.social.

This lists a lot of instances that are not accepting new accounts. I am not sure how useful that is.

This is the reason Mastodon will never fly.

Yup, just like email never took off because people have a selection of mail server providers to choose from.

Most internet users were given an email address with their service, for free, with no setup, care, feeding, or even a single iota of further thought required. If sending and receiving email back then required as much screwing around then as setting up Mastodon does today, do you think it would be as ubiquitous?

Setting up email back in the day required far more screwing around than Mastodon does today, and despite that email continued to gain more and more traction until it became mainstream and even the most computer illiterate people were able to use it.

With all due respect: bullshit. Again, email accounts were provided for free with bog standard Internet service at least in the mid-90s which is the time I can speak to. Hell, my original ISP as part of the sign-up paperwork included instructions on how to log in with Outlook Express (alongside the instructions on how to configure Windows 95 dial-up networking).

Nobody had to think about where they were registering or who they could reach. Email accounts were fungible. At no point did picking the wrong ISP as a dial-up customer functionally limit who I could email. Mastodon, and the Fediverse for that matter, is far more complicated.

Lets say email didn't exist, and instead it came out today, do you think there's a chance in hell it would succeed? Everything in the early days of the internet was difficult in one way or another. Trying to get grandma's AT string right so the modem wouldn't drop at 24000bps and getting the POP3 server was configured was a nightmare. It mostly got easier for the masses when webmail became a thing. But again, I think it would fall on its face if introduced now.

First, it's important to define the metric for success. I would argue that Mastodon is already successful. It's a network that has over a million users on it, and that's growing steadily.

At this point, Mastodon will be around indefinitely, and it will probably outlive every commercial network that exists today. The only thing it needs to stay alive is to have enough users who generate content and run servers, as well as people who are willing to work on the code.

This is the core difference between open source projects and commercial companies. A company has to be able to produce profit, and a large publicly traded company has keep investors happy. Mastodon doesn't need to do any of these things.

Email became popular and commonplace for "the public" when Hotmail and Gmail came along. Before that, you had ISPs offering some POP3 services which people used to send and receive a few emails per week. Maybe your workplace provided email services.

But the main thing is; people only used email if someone was willing to manage it for them. And they almost always went with the default choice (ISP or work email), later replaced by the most convenient option (Hotmail and Gmail).

There's still lots of people using their 20 year old ISP email addresses because they can't be bothered or don't know how to switch.

There is no default or obvious mastodon option. That's the problem.

Mastodon is also being managed by people who operate the servers, and there are obvious defaults. When you go to https://joinmastodon.org/ it guides you through picking a server. This isn't rocket science and I have no idea why people keep bringing this up as if it was an actual problem when it's clearly not.

Having the ability to teach for servers that allow illegal content is a really big put off.

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