I want to quit but there's nothing that truly replace it. I might try Mastaodon but in the meantime, I will do my job by blocking every ads I see on the app.
Your choice does have some consequences. Each Mastodon instance has its own tailored block list, which determines which other instances are blocked in your feed. Instances also have their own codes of conduct. You can view an instance's block list and CoC by clicking the "About" link on the bottom left of the instance home page. (See https://mastodon.social/about for example.)
however, the creators of mastodon have made it super easy to download backups of your follows, your blocklists, etc... and you can import them on any server. so even if that were to happen, you can easily setup another account and be running again.
unlike any of the closed social sites, with mastodon, if one server were to close, the network will be fine.
Yes you do.
Also, look for indicators of active moderation and participation in the Mastodon Server Covenant if you want to avoid toxicity.
Some popular instances have been highlighted here.
Finally, dont be afraid to use a throwaway email and hide behind vpn to create a temporary account on a server or two, just to check it out.
Be kind to the server owners by deleting your temporary accounts, though.
Can I have a handle like @tomte@owndomain.example at the usual Mastodon providers? (I honestly don't know)
That's too bad, really. If your instance admin blocks you because of some spat, the functioning of the migration mechanism seems to be depending on his goodwill, right?
With email, no old mail provider can stop me from being reachable under my mail address in the future.
the way i did it was:
1) signed up on a large instance. found a few hundred of the people i followed on twitter.
2) found that a large percentage of them were on a specific instance (infosec.exchange)
3) i didn’t have to move to that instance, at all. i could interact with them all day everyday just the same as any other other social site. i did however ultimately end up moving there because i like the admin.
compared to every other social network on the planet, moving to a different server is easy. i didn’t lose any followers (people who follow you just automatically follow the new account), and importing the entire list of who i followed was super simple.
most people would never ever notice the difference between servers, but if you were to for some reason need a more niche environment, there are plenty of guides out there which will hold your hand and walk you through migrating to a different server.
That's the problem. If you're already asking which instance to join then Mastodon is not the "replacement" you are looking for; even when discovery and moderation is worse than Twitter.
If the main instance (mastodon.social) was accepting sign-ups, then that is the obvious go to. Clearly that is not the case and only I see tech people here screaming about Twitter's imminent collapse, etc, moving to whatever instance that is accepting sign ups with the majority of the 200M+ users still sitting on Twitter as they didn't bother to move to something worse.
Federated echo-chambers isn't the answer for better content moderation as clearly seen by the issue with journa.host [0]. Unfortunately, centralization is the realistic approach to this which businesses and companies and hundreds of millions of (non-tech) users will continue to stick with and the platform for this is Twitter.
[0] https://twitter.com/ajaromano/status/1594432548222152705
for example, right now, when i run one called fedifinder[0], it finds 473 of the people i follow on twitter. when i import that list into mastodon, im now following all of their mastodon accounts.