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Comment by BadassFractal | Hacker News Reader

I really want to get into Mastodon, but I cannot decide which one I would want to join. Is there one that's say best for.. gaming? Or one best for the arts? I tried to use their search but it's hard to tell which one I'd actually want to be part of.

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For the arts, definitely mastodon.art. For gaming, I couldn't find any good (uptime-wise, and English) instances for just gaming, but https://mastodon.gamedev.place (gamedev) or https://boardgames.social (for the other kind of gaming) came up while I was looking. I used the list at https://instances.social.

Join multiple.

Part of the fun of Mastodon is opening up the Local feed and seeing what everyone on the instance is talking about even if you don't follow them.

Pick one to be your "primary" where you do your following but don't forget to check up on the exciting things going on with the other instances too.

I too couldn't decide, so I started my own private instance recently (it was dead simple with the docker stack), and sometimes I feel a bit isolated and wonder if I should have joined an established instance instead. I suppose that's the burden one takes upon with a private instance: you have to actively go out and find people to follow and interact with. The advantage of course being that you're not bound by any sort of community rules or norms, and all the other advantages of hosting your own services. In any case my main goal was to get myself to write more, regardless of who's reading it, so to that end it's been successful.

You could always set up a second account to dig more into another instance. I'm currently on octodon.social (largely because mastodon.social was full when I first joined), but I've been thinking of creating a personal instance to play around with things that I don't necessarily want to clutter another local timeline with.

Have a look at https://instances.noct.zone/, a hand-curated list of a number of the more popular instances and their themes.

But really, you can join anywhere, don't think about it too hard. You can always follow anyone from anywhere. I have a very diverse follower/follow list, instance-wise.

Make your own instance. Then you can turn it into whatever you want. You can follow anybody in the fediverse, regardless of what instance they're on.

Join one, participate in any of them. That's the beauty of Mastodon.

Lots of people across the fediverse like gaming. You just need to pick an instance that isn't heavy on censorship so you don't find yourself trapped in a small sandbox. Many Mastodon instances suffer from this problem so you might want to try some of the older GNU Social instances that federate with a wider audience like loadaverage or quitter.se

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