And while we’re at it, can you guys recommend the best mastodon client?
I frequently read things about mastodon in lemmy and that pique my curiosity. I just want to try it and probably stick with it if my experience is good.
I host my own instance with Masto.host. (@gadgetboy)
I don’t need to be concerned with the Threads drama or worry about people defederating it - I’m in control.
As for best client, I personally love Mona. It runs on my iPhone, iPad, and Mac and perfectly syncs my position in the timeline across devices. Lots of other great features, too.
The best Mastodon instance is the one that aligns with your interests and values the most.
Are you interested in tech? There’s a couple of tech-focused instances.
Are you some flavor of LGBTQ+? Some instances do a better job at keeping out bad actors, and you can be around like-minded people.
Are you interested in gaming? Movies? Art? Writing? Game development? Home improvement? Gardening? Activism? Memes? News?
Maybe you’re interested in stuff happening in your country or local area?
Why? When you’re looking for new content, and new people to follow, the local and federated timelines of your instance are a good way to do so. Your home timeline includes all the people and hashtags you followed yourself, and their boosts. The local timeline includes all the posts and boosts of everyone on your instance. The federated timeline has all the content that everyone on your instance is following. (Of course you can always follow anyone you like, but I’m making a point about ease of discovering content relevant to you here.)
For this reason, just joining a big, general-purpose is less useful, since you’re just going to get a hodge-podge of random things in these timelines. Perhaps you don’t mind, but I feel like it’s good to point out this feature of the fediverse, as some people might not know, or realize this is a thing.
How? Okay, of course this is silly to recommend without giving you some way to look for these instances. There’s a couple of directories that allow you to search for them. Looking for some briefly came up with instances.social, mastodon.help/instances and mastodonservers.net. Also note you can migrate your account from one instance to another, taking your followed content and even followers with you.
When I first joined, I had no idea what I was doing so I just joined mastodon.social. Unfortunately, I struggled to find discussions/content that interested me and there was also no Local feed, so it just felt empty and impersonal. After a short while, I just stopped using it.
Fast forward six months and after using Lemmy for a few weeks, I finally have my head around this Fediverse thing and decide to have another crack at Mastodon. This time, I searched around and found a smaller instance that is more aligned with my interests and straight away felt at home. Such a different experience this time around!
So yeah, the TL;DR is to shop around for a server that 1) you like the feel of, and 2) has a Local feed to make it easier to get involved with topics that are relevant to you, IMO.
Went with noc.social because they were open, I like Linux, and the name was shorter. However I don’t follow anyone else on that instance that I know of.
I use Mammoth for iOS. I LOVED Tweetbot and tried Ivory but I really like Mammoth more. The dev has done an outstanding job in a very short time.
I am on Mastodon.social, and I use the official app (this one) . I think the official app is quite good, I haven’t had any kind of problem with it.
For reference though I literally never got I to Twitter. I got I to Mastodon to boost fediverse engagement, and while I’m enjoying it I’m not what you’d call a power user so if there are features other apps offer that the official one doesn’t I wouldn’t know what to do with them.
I also didn’t use Twitter but wanted to try to get into mastodon. One thing to note is that the official mastodon app currently doesn’t allow you to follow hashtags, only people. The FEDILABS app allows you to follow topics by hashtags. Since I’m new I didnt have any people I knew of to follow off the bat, so it was nice to be able to follow #scuba and automagically see a bunch of stuff I care about pop up in my home feed.
My home is tech.lgbt, and you can imagine the type of people there suggested by the name (which is exactly what I hoped for when I joined). I had to bounce around a little on lemmy before I found this home though, guess I can’t get it right the first time every time. 😁
The amazing folks at lemmy.world–who have performed quite admirably these past couple of weeks under quite severe battle conditions–also handle mastodon.world. I’ve donated money to them to support their efforts, and joined their mastodon side with the assumption that it will be a good place to hang out.
Like Lemmy Mastodon is federated so it really doesn’t matter that much. You will want to find one that has local chatter you’re interested in or policies you agree with. But after that you subscribe to everyone from everywhere else it doesn’t matter that much.
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