Comment by jacquesm
2 years ago
I've gotten a ton of mileage out of social media, met lots of interesting people, made friends from all over the world, made start-up investments (some good, some bad), helped people, have been helped by people and in general found that there are interesting stories everywhere. But that was when I was still swimming in time and now the trade-off is different. As I wrote, I'm on the fence, but the value is/was definitely there.
I will say since Mastodon blew up, I've found a lot less need for HN in my life. I'm still getting all the interesting tech news and projects, but I'm not doing battle with crazy fanatics. It's more pleasant, and I probably spend less overall time on it because of it.
Same for me and I was surprised how many people I know were already there. I didn't do the statistics for a while but for the people I follow on Twitter it was 10% on 22-11-06 and 23% on 22-11-29.
Which instance did you choose and why that one?
I've been on mastodon.social for like five years. The choice was entirely practical: I didn't want to deal with server shutdowns or defederations, so I joined the biggest instance which is pretty core to the whole network.
Laughably, this is a very centralizing choice. And now I am starting to feel the downsides: Mastodon.social has a really hard time coping with server load when Elon does something dumb!
Fosstodon and Hachyderm would be really good choices though too, I follow a lot of people on both, and they're well-run by decent folks.
I do think articles hype up the choice a lot more than necessary though. The differences are primarily "the moderators", and most people don't do stuff to get moderated anyways. And the platform includes good tools for changing instances too.
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Not ocdtrekkie and I hope you don't mind me adding my opinion: I'm on my own instance but I don't host it myself and that's what I'd recommend. Your home is your castle.
Just use any of the hosters, set up the DNS record and be done. It's pretty similar to hosted e-mail under your own domain and even cheaper than a Twitter Blue subscription.
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