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Comment by lokedhs | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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

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.

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.

> 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.

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

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