Matthew Fish (Oct 07 2024 at 15:07): Matthew Fish (Oct 07 2024 at 15:07):Not a big social media guy here, but trying to expand, anyone have a good Mastadon instance to join, I was looking at defcon.social because signup is open, just unsure about the fediverse I suppose. Any suggestions for a good instance?
Scott Abbey (Oct 07 2024 at 16:27):Honestly, just pick one that seems reliable, isn’t blocked by a majority of the instances out there, and has policies that work for you, especially in regard to blocklists. Beyond that, it really doesn’t matter. You can follow anyone on any other instance that doesn’t block your instance and isn’t blocked by yours. If you find your instance unpalatable for any reason, migrating to another is relatively painless. I started my own instance when the Twitter drama started, but maintaining it became obnoxious so I migrated to hachyderm.io because I appreciated its governance structure and interesting domain name. The most important thing is to just get an account somewhere and start exploring so you can figure out how it fits into your uses.
Scott Abbey (Oct 07 2024 at 16:29):I can recommend hachyderm. It’s got open registration, only blocks hateful instances, and isn’t blocked by any instances I care about. It’s managed by a collective and takes community input seriously, but I haven’t felt any particular need to offer any. It works fine
Matthew Fish (Oct 07 2024 at 18:04):Thanks @Scott Abbey, just joined up!
Siddhartha Golu (Oct 08 2024 at 07:33):I've wanted to explore Mastodon for quite some time, created an account but never could find enough use for it. I didn't want to admit this, but Twitter (X) has surprisingly gotten a much stronger tech presence, especially for machine learning, and I routinely find interesting things via their feed. I found any other social media to be lacking in these aspects, be it Bluesky or Mastodon.
Siddhartha Golu (Oct 08 2024 at 07:36):Would love to hear others' workflows. How do you use Mastodon, which accounts do you follow, are you completely reliant on the accounts you follow or does a feed-based recommendation also play a role?
Philip Durbin (Oct 08 2024 at 12:06):I love the idea of Mastodon. It reminds me of early Twitter when you could use whatever client you wanted and there were no ads. Plus it's federated and decentralized, like email.
Scott Abbey (Oct 08 2024 at 14:14):@Siddhartha Golu Mastodon doesn’t have any algorithm, so you only see posts from people you follow, or posts people you follow have shared.
I suspect my use case is different than many Twitter users. I’ve never found Twitter useful for discovery. It’s always felt like a constantly churning hype train, like Hacker News but with less interesting discussion. I only used it to see what the people I find interesting are up to (ie, micro-blogging, as it was originally meant for), and Mastodon serves that purpose for me much better than Twitter ever did. If I want news I’ll read a news site or reddit. If I want memes I’ve got reddit and Tumblr. For chatting with friends I’ve got Discord. Twitter in its modern form doesn’t work for me, and hasn’t really since long before Elon burned it down.
Matthew Fish (Oct 08 2024 at 14:28):Well after following a couple devs and my podcaster, I am starting to see the appeal to no algorithm. @Scott Abbey any good devs or Hashtags you've found? really working on curating my own personal RSS-like Mastadon feed
Brett Cannon (Oct 08 2024 at 21:56):Most of the Python community moved to Mastodon, so I've found just following people works.
Ron Waldon-Howe (Dec 15 2024 at 00:42):Well, looks like Bluesky is a Nazi bar now, too
Just when I was just curious enough to open a Bluesky account, they save me the trouble by scaring me away
Mastodon forever!
James Thurley (Dec 15 2024 at 08:40):I think Bluesky seems to have the best decentralised moderation tools of any social network.
To use the bar analogy, you get to pick and change the bouncers to your bars (communities) at will.
It sounds like they’re now in the interesting predicament where their users are demanding more centralised moderation.
Ron Waldon-Howe (Dec 15 2024 at 22:12):I get it, moderation is hard
But if the default setting is that the general public will be exposed to anti-LGBT content, and has to opt-out, then that doesn't sell me on Bluesky
It's really hard to solve societal/political issues like racism, sexism, etc if we keep giving platforms to people who exacerbate the problem
Tim Uckun (Dec 16 2024 at 20:50):I don't think they are geared up for moderating the platform. That would require either reddit style moderators (which I hate) or AI of some sorts which I don't think people would like either.
Last updated: Apr 03 2025 at 23:38 UTC