[I have been asked by someone where to migrate to when leaving Meta.]
What's a current introduction to Mastodon of which you would send a link to your friends?
[Please boost.]
@sbi I don't think there's any sort of one-size-fits-all guide that could be written besides... "Expect to be extremely disappointed at first"
For example, what is this person's use case? Do they want to connect with their friends? Are their friends also looking to join Fedi? Or do they care about news more than personal relationships?
here are a couple good things:
1. Find people to follow "parasocially" by being notified of profiles of people who operate sites you visit https://streetpass.social/
2. I always thought this (albiet very long) was a reasonable intro: https://runyourown.social
Also, maybe this is just me, but I would never recommend someone to join Fedi unless I was running the instance that they would join myself or I had a friend whose instance I would be comfortable recommending to them and where I know that my friend would be okay with them joining that instance.
> people who run accounts
So, they are interested in publishing as part of some multi-platform online personality that they are or represent, right? I.e. they don't care about following, only about publishing..
You can tell them this. Activity Pub is kind of like email. When you send email, there's no guarantee that it will be delivered. It might be blocked for some reason.
With email, that typically means if you want to send email, you have to use a professional email sending service. Because a lot of people, for example, people who use Microsoft email will not receive any emails from any domains that are not on Microsoft's allow list and getting on Microsoft's allow list is out of reach for most people who run their own email servers.
However, the relationship is inside out when you look at the Fedi network today. Instead of only messages from big instances being allowed, typically it's more like sometimes messages from big instances are blocked because people don't like them. Most of the mastodon federation tools only allow granularity for blocking based on the instances domain name. That makes sense because if you just block one bad actor on an instance that refuses to moderate adequately or an instance that has open registration, then that person can just create a new account on the same instance and resume their harassment or whatever.
If these people are running accounts for like a brand or any sort of big established thing, the norm is that they would actually run their own instance specifically for that account. Running mastodon itself is probably the most compatible. However, it does use a lot of resources and it's kind of inefficient. There's another server impl called GoToSocial that's much more cpu efficient and it would be cheaper to operate, potentially easier as well.
If it's more like a small community page or a meme page or something, I suppose they could get on someone else's instance... The smaller it is, the more likely that their posts will reach everyone who's interested. However, keep in mind when you join a small instance and then you attract thousands of followers that may actually increase the amount of money that that instance operator has to pay in order to keep their thing running.
In terms of message visibility, Everyone who sees your posts is going to see a different comment thread because every server has different rules about what domains are blocked. So if someone from hackyderm comments on SBI's post, I won't see it by default because my instance does not federate with hackyderm.
If they go to someone else's instance, this would go for replies on their posts as well. They would be subjected to whatever rules their instance has. Which is probably a good thing in terms of harassment, but it can also be a bad thing if you miss a comment that maybe you didn't want to miss.
This is why publishers, posters, brands and meme lords tend to operate their own servers because then they get to choose what messages they see.
I'm sure someone else could explain this better, but I don't know if any links off the top of my head.
@forestjohnson These people run accounts on different social media sites, and want to wrap their head around Mastodon. I could spend 2hrs explaining it (and miss several important topics), or point them at a well-written manual.
This is about explaining what instances are, how posting works, the rules of visibility, how to find accounts (in general)..., than how to pick an instance that suites them and which accounts to follow. (I'm happy to help them to find a suitable instance, though.)