Steve Troughton-SmithI'll be honest, not being able to get a handle on mastodon.social put me off adopting Mastodon for quite a while (until I found the invite system). While I'm glad there are other instances, that doesn't really help you if the one instance you do want to be on is full. This is my third Mastodon account, but the one I'll stick with
johnwhitley@stroughtonsmith Related, as my wife just discovered: it can be quite hard to sort out what instance you want to be on *before* you have an account! Afterwards, it gets a lot easier b/c of increased community access.
Jeff Hedlund@johnwhitley @stroughtonsmith I kind of just picked one not knowing what was best, what community access increases based on the instance?
@jhedlund @stroughtonsmith There are quite a number of topical instances where there's going to be an increased balance of that content. e.g. infosec.exchange, ruby.social, front-end.social, macstories.net, and more popping up all the time. (e.g. BTS/Army folks starting their migrations.) It's a big reason why it's nice that @[email protected] added the ability to follow the local posts of other instances.
@jhedlund @stroughtonsmith @[email protected] And to address your point about access, that would mostly apply re: visibility on these topical instances. Essentially, another way to blend forum-style communication patterns with follower social-network patterns.
@johnwhitley @stroughtonsmith @icecubesapp Nice, thanks for the explanation, I hadn't thought about the "Local" instance chatter, that makes sense