I would never go anywhere near Twitter or Facebook. But Mastodon sounds interesting. Has anyone here had any experience of using it?

I haven't but I would love to know your analysis of why Mastodon would be a better fit for you?

I've looked at it from afar for quite a few years but don't think highly enough of social control media in any form to actually make any accounts. I do like the idea of having separate instances for different topics / communities / goals. Two concerns of many are the abusive javascript and the centralized blacklists. The latter kind of defeat the purpose of federated communications.

https://mastodon.help/en

Then the instances do seem to come and go as the various admins burn out from either administrative work or content moderation or just plain having their budgets depleted.

That said, if you feel like trying to set up your own instance, I'd still say go for it. If you would prefer to join an existing instance, then there is a little too much choice and it will take a bit of investigation to find an appropriate instance or two:

https://mastodon.help/instances/en

Edit: See also,

https://fediverse.observer/
https://fediverse.party/

I have been using it for the past 2 weeks and really like it so far. My feed shows me exactly what I want based on the people I am following without the 'algorithm' deciding what I should see.

There are multiple instances (think email servers where you can create an account) and each instance can talk to and get feeds from all the other instances (Just like you can email anyone on any server). You can follow folks from any instance on your instance.

Some points to remember:

* Text Search doesn't work across instances because that would need every instance to be aware of all the posts on all instances (This search thing is annoying as my mind doesn't translate text to hastag automatically so it takes a bit of hit and try to find stuff)
* Use Hastags to search as they are propagated across

https://fedi.tips/ is a good introduction to the whole thing.

It's good that you have found a tool you like but I think that it's important to re-iterate that the "'algorithm'" in either Twitter or Facebook does NOT control, for the most part, what I see.

Can you please expand on what you mean by this? Facebook doesn't show me every post made by the people i follow even in the chronological view. It prioritises posts from folks you interact with the most. No idea how it prioritises posts when not in chronological view.

Twitter non chronological view shows all trending stuff and the most popular posts etc as well. All of which is managed by an algorithm. One of the things that was promised after the recent ownership change was that Twitter's algorithm would be opensourced and available for review. But that hasn't happened yet.

I use it, from both Linux desktop and Android phone.
I like it.
No adds, and many of the people there are either Techi, or Tech adjacent and "get it".
There is no "Big Money" driving how it operates, so ethics and manners matter: but how much depends upon the opinions, ethics, and manners of the syadmin that owns the server you live on.
BTW: Nothing stops you from living on more than one at the same time!

It is NOTHING like Twitter, Facebook, Google+, or anything that went before other than (perhaps) a kind of Fidonet brought into the 21st Century. (Okay, I actually AM that old and geeky! I ran ANP BBS back in the day.)

Been using it for a couple of years.
The web interface or Whalebird are best on desktop.

On Android the apps are Tusky, Fedilab, and Mastodos from Izzyondroid's f-droid repo. toot is a nice cli/tui client plus it is most distros repos.

There is also https://cuckoo.social/
This Mastodon web app mimics the look and feel of Google Plus.

Plus it is easy enough to setup your own instance.
https://docs.joinmastodon.org/admin/install/

I toyed with it when it was new, but, frankly, "tweet" style "social" media does not interest me.

However, the EFF has a series of articles on it that you might find helpful.

So what are good servers? I browsed a page on the Mastodon site which had a lot of servers on it but nothing jumped out at me as a community I'd really profit from joining. Like this one for example!

My guess would be fosstodon.org, or else maybe floss.social, or even bsd.network. However, there is a question about how on-topic they remain.

I found this FAQ which I think is very good. I'm reading it currently.

There was a news article about it here over the weekend:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-11-...over/101674440

"Over 1 million people have joined Mastodon since October 27. Between that and those who returned to their old accounts, the number of active users has risen to over 1.6 million today, which, for context, is over 3 times what it was just about two weeks ago."

This post on there today seems important: https://aus.social/@thedragstate/109377827512403023

...

Well, I signed up to fosstodon. Now it goes for moderation. I'll keep you posted.