If you have _ever_ signed up for an email account, but are now complaining about choosing a mastodon instance… looks like you can figure this out, just pick one my dude. 😎
@adamghill Sorry, but this isn’t comparable at all. First, in e-mails there isn’t a sort of “moderation” on the topics you talk about or who you want to talk with —or can talk to you.
Second, Mastodon instances aren’t as well known or established as the biggest free and paid e-mail providers. This means that one instance can disappear from night to day or have severe performance issues —which again, doesn’t happen with e-mail.
Third, there are significant differences even in the type of usage you can do in a Mastodon instance, like character size of toots and emoticons.
And the list goes on… So it’s a disservice and an utmost display of ignorance what you wrote here.
@crls Do you think https://mastodon.social/ is going to suddenly disappear? I’m pretty sure it won’t, so it seems like a fine default.
If you don’t think there is a wide discrepency between email services, my Outlook and Gmail accounts would like to have a word.
Most won't care about instance differences -- they just want to chat with friends and see what’s going on. Pick an instance, follow people, and don’t overthink it.
Anyway it’s better than email because you can switch it later. 🤷
@adamghill If you didn’t know or don’t remember, but Mastodon.social was closed for signup for several days during the first “Mastodon rush”. I don’t ever remember Gmail, Hotmail or Yahoo ever closing signing ups.
Also you ignored again the fact that this instance has a looooong list of “moderated servers” which you can’t communicate with. For example, the freeatlantis one has an interesting account there which makes graphs about the number of accounts signing up to #Mastodon instances, with growth over time that, if you’re member of mastodon.social you couldn’t follow.
@crls >Mastodon.social was closed for signup
True. Looks like it is still closed. My bad.
>I don’t ever remember Gmail... ever closing signing ups
Gmail absolutely limited the number of signups for a while.
In any event, it seems like you might be in the set of people who really care about your server instance. More power to you. My point is that for *most* people it just doesn’t matter.
Picking any option is better than sticking around Twitter.
@adamghill > “Gmail absolutly limited the number of signups for a while”
Well, that was true in the release phase of it. If you don’t remember, Gmail was “invite-only” in the beginning, and the invites were sold for quite a chunk of money in eBay back in the days. I remember to have friends crazy asking me invites to Gmail and I made a list on Excel for the invites to send to as soon as they were released to me.
Still, after the “release” phase, there was never a sign up restriction.
> “It seems like you might be in the set of people who really care about your server instance”
I actually didn’t care much, until I got a post “moderated” when I replied to an user in other instance preaching hate speech —obviously condemning it, but in a sarcastic way. So I very quickly learned the importance of taking some time to really check about instances. Read my pinned toot in my profile about it.