ML2

@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.

@mattblaze @jeffjarvis @mmasnick It would not surprise me if Musk thinks the blue checkmark can *replace* advertisers.

@freemo@qoto.org To be fair, a lot of the rise in COVID cases is due to Texas and Florida being run by culture warrior lunatics... Even so, Biden still could have done something earlier rather than remain hands off until his recent vaccine mandate orders, so he's not blame free here. I'm more annoyed with Biden about the fact that the FCC head hasn't been appointed yet after 8 months.

@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.

@Popehat I'm honestly a bit surprised masthead.social was widely blocked. Never heard of or had any issues with accounts there.

@OrganizedTRex @Popehat I see. I'm surprised moderators decided to defederate from the entire instance rather than just block that one guy's account, but then again, in my several years on the Fediverse I've seen my share of drama.

@rw@shitposter.club @princesalde@mstdn.social Nice Warhammer meme!

@warren__terra @Popehat I see.

@countrymarxist @Popehat It's up to you. Apparently the admin has some rather cranky views on reality.

@mtsw@mastodon.social To be fair, the difference between Nazi Germany and Twitter is that Musk is actually losing support, wealth, and advertisers in real time. Each new major mistake causes people to flee here, and given the rate of technical issues has increased I don't see that stopping. Plus the FTC and EU regulators are not happy, and Elon seems to be blowing them off. That being said, I don't see Twitter surviving Elon, the months that follow are going to be weird, and any attempt to limit the damage to other things besides Twitter (and to get people over here) is a good thing. (In case anyone asks, I have been on Mastodon since 2019 and completely left Twitter over a month ago after spending my last week telling people about here.)