Cool Mastodon.social instances?

April 4, 2017 1:55 PM

After reading this Sarah Jeong article, I'm interested in giving Mastodon.social a try. However, the "primary" instance is not accepting new registrations at the moment. Do any MeFites belong to (or know of) an interesting Mastodon instance that shares the values of MetaFilter and the community Jeong describes in her article?
posted by tobascodagama to Computers & Internet (13 answers total)

I'm not sure about "shared values", but there are a handful of MeFites on mastodon.xyz and they're still accepting sign-ups.
posted by Phire at 2:44 PM on April 4, 2017

I'm on mastodon.xyz, and looks like it's holding up so far. Same user if anyone is looking to test the service out.
posted by griffey at 3:42 PM on April 4, 2017

I was going to suggest icosahedron.website, which has an explicitly anti-racist, anti-fascist moderation policy, but it looks like they are also closed to new registrations at the moment. They plan to re-open “in a bit.”
posted by mbrubeck at 3:58 PM on April 4, 2017

Looks like .xyz is closed to registrations as well, unfortunately! I guess that's the downside of a small, decentralised network getting a sudden burst of attention. (icosahedron's anti-fascist rule sounds awesome to me, I'll have to keep an eye on that one.)
posted by tobascodagama at 5:06 PM on April 4, 2017

I just signed up on octodon.social
posted by larrybob at 5:26 PM on April 4, 2017

Do different instances tend to have people interested in talking about different kinds of topics?
posted by thefool at 5:54 PM on April 4, 2017

@prismatic7 on octodon.social. I was never much of a tweeter, let's see how I toot.

Wait...
posted by prismatic7 at 5:59 PM on April 4, 2017

Do different instances tend to have people interested in talking about different kinds of topics?

From what I can tell, some of them do and some don't. It's up to the instance owner what rules to enforce, and then up to other instance owners whether to continue federating other instances with differing rules.
posted by tobascodagama at 6:01 PM on April 4, 2017

I wound up making my account on social.tchncs.de due to the whole "it's literally illegal to post Nazi shit in Germany" aspect. Witches.Town also sounds neat, but they were a little slow getting me my confirmation email.
posted by tobascodagama at 6:32 PM on April 4, 2017

I too have an account on social.tchncs.de.
posted by snap, crackle and pop at 9:24 PM on April 5, 2017

signed up on rock-hosting.net but that was just due to uptime - now I understand instances a bit more I'll have look around for something a bit more geared towards me - as I mentioned on Mastodon though, I'm not sure how successful it can be if the instance you sign up with goes down you lose everything. Needs to be a way to associate one account with multiple instances somehow so if one goes down your toots/followers etc aren't lost.

It's interesting though. I had tried one of the blockchain social networks a while ago, based around ethereum - it was a good idea but filled with bots.
posted by twistedonion at 1:49 AM on April 6, 2017

I'm on mastodon.cloud and have posted with the Metafilter hashtag--which I'd love other people to use too.
posted by wintersweet at 9:48 AM on April 6, 2017

If other folks are looking for an instance to join, tooter.today is a new service that suggests possible Mastodon instances. You get the about page, and a brief report on uptime, users, status, current posts and instance connectivity. If the instance doesn't look like a fit, just hit the button again to have it show you a different one.
posted by zamboni at 11:46 AM on April 6, 2017