Comment by ocdtrekkie

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.