I’ve been experimenting with Mastodon recently - it’s long past time to move on from Twitter/X. Benedict Evan’s post on Twitter was an excellent catalyst for making the move.
To sign up for mastodon, I really strugged with the best way to do that. I ran into the following issues:
- Do I pay for hosting so that I can use my own domain name?
- If no, what instance should I sign up for?
As awesome as it would be to have my own domain name in use (and I love that, don’t get me wrong) I thought the best thing to do was to sign up on mastodon.social, and then figure out the rest later. I believe the search for users is better if you belong to the same instance, and figured free beats having to worry about setup.
To find users, I basically went through my old twitter to see who has a mastodon instance in their profile. From there, I figured I’d gradually find more folks via rss feeds/hacker news/etc.
My last item that I need to find is a good iPhone app, but that’s something that can easily be accomplished. More to come I’m sure, but it’s very exciting!