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This assumes one cares about the local community aspect of Mastodon. Granted many people do in which case your advice is spot on. But if you're just looking for a pure Twitter replacement, it doesn't matter. In fact you might be better off on one of the big players as they're probably less likely to be fly-by-night.

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> In fact you might be better off on one of the big players as they're probably less likely to be fly-by-night.

The biggest advantage of a big instance like mastodon.social is that account discovery and following are much easier when the accounts are on the same instance of you. Otherwise, you have to do a lot of copy and paste into search fields.

It would be nice if new users were simply assigned a big, generic server (like in many MMOs) and then later had the option to seek out and find a niche server. The vast, vast majority of new users wouldn't know or care either way.

That's more or less what _happens_; people join mastodon.social and then move.

I can confirm this is what I did. I started on mastodon.social, then eventually moved to a smaller instance when I got jealous of their local timeline. Then I'm now hosting my own server in the closet.

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