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Comment by seanthemon | Hacker News Reader

As a mastodon layman, how do I get myself started? Just directly through mastodon site or some other way?

Couple suggestions:

A lot of people join on a big instance (like mastodon.social, which is the biggest). It doesn't matter as much, as long it's not an extreme-left/right oriented instance, because those end up blocking or being blocked by other instances. You can follow anyone on any mastodon server that is not blocked by/from yours.

If you basically want to have niche discussions, joining a niche instance might be the way (like urusai.social for anime). If not, I personally prefer just going with a big instance. I'm just moving back to mastodon.social for my main profile, and there are 2 reasons:

- Searching for content: if you are on a small instance that doesn't federate with a lot of instances, searching will not return any posts/users from those.

- Reading replies to other's posts: This is where it's a bit weird, and they don't yet developed a solution. If I post something on instance A, and you are on instance B that federated with it, you see my post. But if a person from instance C (that federates with A but not yet with B) replies to my post, you won't see their replies. This lead to some people being like: "is that why a bunch of people on different instances reply the exact same thing, as if it wasn't already said in the replies?"

I've joined https://fosstodon.org/ mainly because it was already reasonably big and was close to my interests. 1) Then I just looked for #introduction tag in local and federated timeline and started to subscribe to people I found interesting 2) Just opened local timeline (everything that written on that instance) and was inserting myself into interesting conversations

Join an instance, it really doesn't matter that much which one, as long as it's not one on the "freeze peach" side (I'd explain why, but I think you'll know them when you see them). If you pick one with a theme closer to your interests the next step will be easier, but it's less important than you might think.

Then you look at the federated feed (all messages that are sent to your instance) and follow anyone who posts anything remotely interesting.

Once your feed is too quick to follow, unfollow anyone posting any message you feel is uninteresting until the feed slows down.

At this point you should have a pretty nice starting point.

That's how I started in 2017 and I'm still there so I must have done something right at least.

Is there a way of finding a good instance? The idea of accidentally joining a bad instance and not realizing is causing me some weird starter anxiety

I appreciate the thoughtful response!

Just go with the "main" instance: mastodon.social. Unless you have a strong motive not to.

Edit: I do love mindly.social for a more laid back/be nice overall sentiment. Although this week I decided to move back to mastodon.social because of the comments/replies thing I mentioned in my other comment here

From what I heard mastodon.social is rather lacking in moderation and therefor limited by lots of other instances.

I went for fosstodon.org, as I think this suits my interests well enough, but there are other general or broad topic instances out there.

that's the thing: "lots of other instances" doesn't mean much depending on what you are looking for. mastodon.social has over 400k users, and federate with most of the 10k+ user instances. So, having lots of 1k user instances blocking it still doesn't matter as much.

And the second thing is the type of instances that are blocking mastodon.social: based on what I usually see going on on mastodon and lemmy, they are probably instances focusing heavily of LGBTQ+ or other marginalized communities. So unless that's the most important thing to you, you won't miss it.

quick note: those communities can be REALLY annoying sometimes. I remember seeing people mentioned that they got jumped in because they posted food pics without content warning, in an instance about.... food and cooking. So, if instances like this are blocking mastodon.social... go ahead

You can move from one instance to another if you change your mind

Sort of. You can move your list of follows, and you can automatically inform your followers that you've moved and most of the time, but not all of the time, their instance will automatically update their list of follows, but you can't automatically move your content or backdate it on the new instance.

Is that a design descision, or just something that's not implemented?

Adding an 'originally-posted' field to exports, and allowing mass-posting on the target should technically work, and non-technically be a tricky problem.

To be honest I'm not sure, I've stayed mostly away from core Mastodon development, happy to just be a user.

> Is that a design descision, or just something that's not implemented?

The Mastodon API (currently the defacto API for Fedi clients) has no support for backdated posts (see [1]) and servers will push out any status you create to your followers which would mean a deluge of previously seen content. Backdating and a flag for "do not push out backdated posts" could be added[2] but there's a whole raft of problems that come along with it (resource usage for large accounts, who can use the functionality, how do you stop abuse, etc.)

[1] https://docs.joinmastodon.org/methods/statuses/#create

[2] I fudged this into my Akkoma instance to let me backfill history from a Twitter bot.

I suggest making your first experiences be a "journey" between instances to learn from each of them. You can test account migration as you go along.

Followgraph is also great for finding new users with similar interests.

https://followgraph.vercel.app/

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