Comment by SwellJoe
2 days ago
I'm on mas.to, which is, I believe, the second largest after mastodon.social. I picked it because it's got the shortest URL, but it has been quietly reliable and up to date. Its moderation and defederation policies are stricter than some might like.
I follow many people who use infosec.exchange and hachyderm.io and they seem to be nerd-oriented instances. But it doesn't matter all that much, since you can follow and interact across the whole federation. I'd say just pick one that's reasonably large and old enough to have proven it is run by people who know how to run a reliable service and are in it for the long haul. It's possible to move to a new instance with only a little inconvenience, so don't agonize too much over it.
You can also get a personal hosted instance (I use masto.host) to serve as an identity instance pretty cheap, but you have to be careful about keeping track of media usage, avoid posting images and use relays sparingly.
Before that I just had an account on multiple (mostly gamedev) instances.
Mastodon has its issues but one benefit of decentralization is you don't really have to commit to anything.
Good point. With the centralised internet maybe we've become too accustomed to having a single identity for everything. On the old internet you had a different, unconnected account on every forum, and we liked it that way.
I don't think anyone liked that necessarily, not having to deal with multiple logins is one reason decentralized social media and social logins took off.
Having identities tied to a domain and an instance is one of the biggest flaws with the fediverse IMO.
I'd much prefer something like Solid or Nostr where your identity is owned by you and described by a single file. Maybe involving PGP keys or some kind of cryptographic hash, although that might be too much of a barrier to be viable. It's a hard problem and the way the fediverse handles it is awkward at best.
> Its moderation and defederation policies are stricter than some might like.
That sucks. I'm not exactly looking forward to joining another community with "strict" moderation.
Every mastodon instance I look up seems to be like this... Guess I'm stuck on X.
Every instance has their own moderation and defederation policies.
And, you might like to look into what that actually means. In the case of mas.to, the controversial decisions include defederation of instances that have a history of bigotry, usually anti-trans bigotry (the kind of bigotry lots of mainstream social sites allow and even protect).
Defederation is a large hammer, so some folks think mas.to is too strict. But, I personally prefer no slurs or child porn in my feed (adults posting nudes of themselves with a content warning is fine, both by my reckoning and the policy of mas.to), so I've never had reason to complain, nor have I ever had an interaction with moderators.
X is far more censorious than Mastodon of the kinds of free speech that are actually politically meaningful, so I'm surprised you call it out specifically as your free speech safe space. But, if you mean the same thing Musk means when you say "free speech", the right to punch down with impunity, perhaps X is the right place. Punching down is exactly the kind of thing that gets you banned on many Mastodon instances. It is a place that is by and large extremely intolerant of intolerance, but accepting of most everything else.
Don't think I could punch down on anyone even if I wanted to. I just don't fit in with the "intolerant of intolerance" folks.
Haven't seen anyone get censored on X without a court order yet, but I haven't been there that long. Who knows.
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HN has strict moderation, so does email.
I've been on HN for just over ten years now and have never been banned despite participating in all sorts of controversial discussions. HN is actually a pretty good free speech benchmark.
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