Mastodon: What are instances and why should I care?
The idea of Mastodon instances may be a bit confusing for new users, but it's not that complicated and once you understand, you'll be able to choose the right instance for yourself.
We all had that moment when we wanted to create our first Mastodon account and then had to decide which instance to use. Instance? What the?! What does that even mean? Why do I have to choose?
Good news first: you can simply choose one of the popular instances like mastodon.social or mastodon.online and you'll be fine. But you may have a better experience when you take your time and select another one.
The first thing you have to know is that Mastodon is not like Twitter or Threads or all those other platforms. Mastodon is not a platform or a service; it's more of a software.
And as with most software, you can install Mastodon on different computers. There is no such thing as "The Firefox" where you go to and log in and have your browser account. You download Firefox on your computer and install it.
That's what can be done with Mastodon. Well, it's a bit more complicated as the software is pretty complex, and therefore most people won't do that—but you could.
And there are plenty of people installing Mastodon on their servers. And each of those installations is a Mastodon instance! There are public ones where everybody can create an account, and there are private ones.
There are general instances like the ones mentioned above. Everybody can create an account and start posting. And there are instances related to a certain topic. You can create an account and start posting on most of them, but some of them want to make sure you really wish to post about that topic. In that case you can register your account but have to wait until it's approved.
Why?
But why care? Because on Mastodon there are different timelines. There is your home timeline consisting of people you follow, and there is a timeline for your instance where you can see the most recent posts of all members of your instance.
And here it gets interesting. Let's say you are interested in poetry and you joined an instance focused on that topic; you can be pretty sure that most of the posts on the instance timeline are about poetry! The same with hashtags.
Most topic-related instances are smaller than the general ones. So by joining them, you surround yourself with like-minded people, making it easier to connect and find interesting posts you really care about.
Moving
So you may think that you made a mistake choosing a certain instance, and you would better fit into another one. That's no problem. Mastodon allows you to move your account from one instance to another, taking with you your followers and followings.
Therefore, choose your instance, and if you don't feel at home there, don't worry, you can move to another one any time.
By the way. When cross posting with Sociabli we cannot detect when you moved your instances. You may need to log in and add a new connection. We'll then continue cross-posting with the new one.