Okay. Migrated from masthead.social to mastodon.social. Meanwhile, here's the Substack on my decision to leave Twitter.
@Popehat I'm honestly a bit surprised masthead.social was widely blocked. Never heard of or had any issues with accounts there.
@mathlover @Popehat Crap I am on masthead.social. Should I try to migrate?
@countrymarxist @Popehat It's up to you. Apparently the admin has some rather cranky views on reality.
@countrymarxist @mathlover @Popehat Seems nice here on mstdn.social and our admin (at sign stux) is quite nice.
@cordeliane @countrymarxist @Popehat He is very nice from what I have seen following him.
My instance is also nice, but it's also been subject to quite a bit of Fediverse drama originating from before the current surge of new users that is rather complicated to explain. I still like it though; it's a nice community with nice people and an excellent administrator (freemo) and mod team, and there are some really nice features here that are hard to find elsewhere.
@countrymarxist @mathlover @Popehat Do you happen to know a good, current list of instances—ideally with moderator listed? Would like to periodically browse, since I would like to find political and/or gaming instances to check out.
@cordeliane @countrymarxist @Popehat I know of several lists:
https://instances.social/ is a very general directory. Some of the servers are good, others are ... not. Do your research here before going further.
https://mastodonservers.net/servers is one I found recently. It's a good list from what I can tell; not too restrictive, not so broad as to include really bad instances.
https://fediverse.party/ is more general than Mastodon, involving other (often more featureful) instances than most you will find on Mastodon. The downside is that it relies on a *very* slow site for listing the servers themselves. On the plus side, there is a curated list (https://fediverse.party/en/portal/servers/) of servers by theme.
If you want to know who administers each server, simply look at the about page on the server itself. This page also generally gives a lot of info, including rules, federation between servers, and other important details.
Regarding choosing a server: while you should shy away from red flags for under-moderated servers, it's also possible to find yourself on an instance that is excessive or heavy-handed in moderation. One sign of this that is not as obvious as others (such as rules lists being draconian) is if the server refuses to list who it federates with (merely forgetting to list is common, but if a server says it *won't* list who it federates with for a specific, that's a bad sign).
If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to me for advice! I'm happy to give advice on whether a server passes my smell test, and why or why not.
