What are your favorite Mastodon technology/programming community servers

What are your favorite Mastodon technology/programming community servers

1. Don’t stress too much about the server choice. You can switch later if you want to.

   Personally, I just don’t care about the local timeline of my server. I only follow people and hashtags. That works fine, too.

2. https://fosstodon.org has a focus on FOSS software with a nice and active community.

   1. mort

      edited 2 hours ago

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      I can second this, I’ve been there for a while. The operators always seemed kind and serious, and they post quite actively and are pretty transparent. (Here’s me, by the way :))

   2. akselmo

      59 minutes ago

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      I used to be part of mastodon.technology but moved to fosstodon when it closed.

      So far so good, maybe a bit too active for my taste but I’m happy there.

3. I really like the look of https://hachyderm.io/ - Kris, the lead admin, streams sessions on Twitch about running it where you can see the actual servers for the instance sat behind her in her basement.

4. rod

   2 hours ago

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   When I chose a server, I considered their federation policy, because I didn’t want to out-source deciding which accounts I should be allowed to follow.

   https://fosstodon.org/about and https://hachyderm.io/about/more both have long lists of suspended servers: “No data from these servers will be processed, stored or exchanged, making any interaction or communication with users from these servers impossible”.

   I prefer the federation policy of https://qoto.org/about/more, which doesn’t suspend any servers. There’s a few others like that.

   1. icy

      1 hour ago

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      The unfortunate reality of being on an instance like qoto.org is other, “heavily moderated” instances will suspend/silence you because of the lax moderation policy.

      1. rod

         43 minutes ago

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         The qoto.org admin notes:

         Thankfully the servers blocking us are few and far between and are limited to only the most excessive and aggressive block lists. As I said, QOTO has one of the largest federation footprints on the fediverse,

         https://qoto.org/@freemo/109319817943835261

   2. bn4t

      1 hour ago

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      I can understand your line of thought, but often times there are good reasons to defederate certain instances. For example pawoo.net (japanese instance) allows content which is illegal in other countries. And since mastodon caches content of remote servers, this makes defederation or at least restrictions almost a must.

      1. rod

         45 minutes ago

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         Yes, qoto.org’s policy is:

         We do not silence or block other Fediverse instances based on agenda, politics, or opinions held by their staff or users. We only require servers we federate with to follow one simple rule: respect a user’s right to disengage. Offending servers will only be silenced, not blocked, blocks will be reserved for technical assaults only such as DDoS attacks, or legal issues such as sexual abuse and child porn.

         qoto.org doesn’t currently block any servers, but is willing to if needed for the above technical/legal reasons.

         Other instances blocklists go beyond these technical/DDoS reasons. The advantage of a federated protocol is being able to pick.

   3. Wow, I didn’t know Mastodon instances are censoring each other already.

      I just tried to send a message from qoto.org to hachyderm.io and it did not arrive.

      No error message on the sending side.

      Then I sent a message from indiehackers.social to hachyderm.io and it arrived immediately.