But, The Right Thing doesn't exist yet, and this does. So the question for potential users is whether to take the risk of building a following here (and encouraging followers to migrate from twitter) when it could easily fail in any of the usual ways, within days or months. I don't have an opinion yet :)
@Meaningness I feel pretty torn about this, and also uneasy about this instance's policies w/r/t heterodox thinking

For all users, it's worth checking out the mastodon.social content moderation guidelines, at https://mastodon.social/about/more

As @sonya points out, not everyone may be happy with them.

As our host @Gargron point out, if you don't like them, you can run your own instance.

But instances choose who they peer with... so the Mastodon-based network may balkanize.

@Meaningness @sonya I've watched this play out and have had to deal with it since the first time it happened, I may have made the first (long-term) server ever completely blocked by other servers. I've watched how it played out with my own and with other servers if you ever want to know about that.
@MoonMan @sonya Yah... Overall, I'd love to see this thing work, and it's a really impressive one-person tech demo, but I don't think it addresses any of the hard issues, so ... I wouldn't bet on any of us using it a month from now.

@Meaningness @sonya
>I don't think it addresses any of the hard issues

tough, but fair

@meaningness you may want to have a look at other instances (let's say the ones with most interesting people are blocked on mastodon) , there is a list at http://www.fediverse.org/

I understand some people in this new wave are planning to start a new instance, this would actually be great - hell, a bunch of us run single-person or single person + markov bot(s) instances

Also take a look at the other implementations (stock gnusocial, postActiv - which is @maiyannah's fork that is trying to bring sanity to the ancient GS code); they're "bleah, php" instead "bleah, ruby" and they have their warts, but they are reasonably easy to set up for a technical person

P.S. obligatory https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t1lYU5CA40o
@MoonMan @Meaningness why were you completely blocked by the other servers?
@sonya my server is doesn't have many speech limitations, so it runs up against hate speech etc. There also were some flare-ups between my users and mastodon users. The first server we were blocked by was an instance dedicated for pornography, they blocked our entire instance because the admin said somebody on my server said something rude to him, haha.
@sonya basically my rules on speech are 1. no doxing 2. honor blocks, if someone blocks you, don't get around the block to keep messaging at them 3. dont do anything that will take down the server, either technical (aka hacks) or legal.