Post #1797620

@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.