What led you to choose your current Mastodon instance?

[beandev@social.tchncs.de]

@RuthODay2
Phew, that was so long ago. Back then, there wasn't nearly as much variety in instances.
@svenja

[psy@social.troll.academy]

@RuthODay2 [x] I run my own

[eruonna@chaosfem.tw]

@RuthODay2
Since my current instance was a migration when the previous one shut down, part of my reason was having connections with people on the instance, plus some general observations of fedi drama/callouts/whatever

[writingwoman@literatur.social]

@RuthODay2 Special interest (I‘m a Writer) and I know the Host of this Server ️

[hiker@akk.fedcast.ch]

@RuthODay2 Perhaps we should even look further—the Fediverse consists of much more than just Mastodon instances.

[caravantraveller@social.cologne]

@RuthODay2

We chose a local one.

[ruthoday2@chaosfem.tw]

@psy

I would put that in general research beyond the blurb, unless you did something like getting a credit report document to get a bank loan to buy the equipment to start the instance.

[ruthoday2@chaosfem.tw]

@eruonna

If you had some knowledge but didn't seek specific documents, I would put that in the third response.

If I had to do it over again, I would add two responses, one for having some previous knowledge of the instance or people running it and one for the people hosting their own instance. Both of those kind of fall between blindly clicking because the instance has my country name in it and running a police check on someone.

[faithisleaping@anarres.family]

@RuthODay2 @eruonna I'm one of the founders of my instance. But it's also not a single-user instance. But that's kind of a weird case and I guess would fall under "knew the people"

[ruthoday2@chaosfem.tw]

@faithisleaping @eruonna

I would put that in general research beyond the blurb, unless you did something like getting a credit report document to get a bank loan to buy the equipment to start the instance.

[cunobaros@mendeddrum.org]

@RuthODay2 The instance was set up by and for an old (going back to the early 90s) online community I've been a member of for decades.
So I'm voting people.

[jesstheunstill@infosec.exchange]

@RuthODay2 I saw some other people on Twitter I respected were going here, so I figured it'd be a good place to start. I wanted a large enough instance to not get too embroiled in meta-dramas like far too many trans Discords I'd been in at the time, but still a pretty solid mod team all things considered. So I've stuck around. It's not perfect but it's been stable, great uptime, clean out the worst instances, and when I go to the mods with problems, they almost always are responsive.

[ruthoday2@chaosfem.tw]

@JessTheUnstill

The third option seems to be a catch all, between "I live in Grand Fenwick so grand.fenwick.social seems like a good one" and, at the other extreme, doing background checks on specific people.

[jesstheunstill@infosec.exchange]

@RuthODay2 Yeah, that's where I voted. It was at least a vibe check based on people who know people, but I'm not going to go down some rabbit hole of individual mods. I figured I'd move if the vibes went badly. And tbh I think I made a good enough choice. After all the .art and fedipact drama of 23 and 24, we still ended up with plenty of good instances federating with us, which is good enough for me.