@pwgallagher what is it your looking for? That may provide a clue as to if you will find what you want here. I've been here a while so i may be able to give you some idea as to what to expect.
@pwgallagher The system is federated. So you wont get much of a difference between instances in terms of who you can connect with. Its all one massive network.
The difference between instances boils down to moderation policy. the owners of an instance can choose to block people and instances from their instance, and thus no one on that instance can connect with that content. So picking an instance mostly comes down to picking one that suits your desired style of moderation.
This instance is free speech which means we only block people or instances in extreme cases.
@freemo Understood! The local/ federation network is interesting. So far, I like the the Web interface to Mstdn, too. The facilities for conversation and browsing are both pretty neat and Qoto seems like a fast node. So stuff to like already.
@pwgallagher did you check out https://halcyon.qoto.org or https://video.qoto.org yet? The first is a front end that replicates twitter you can use with mastodon here. The other is QOTOs peertube instance. Peertube is federated using the same standard as mastodon but more like youtube. So you can follow an account on peertube and get the videos posted by that account right in your mastodon feed.
@freemo That’s interesting. Unfortunately @pwgallagher cannot log-in to halcyon.qoto.org (“instance does not exist”). WIll try again later.
@pwgallagher you need to do it like this: @ pwgallagher @ qoto.org without the spaces
@freemo Thanks, that’s very friendly. Hard to say precisely. My Twitter stream is a fire-hose of people I follow (mostly but not exclusively public policy wonks) none of whom is on Mastodon (according to the Mstdn “bridge” facility). So I’m going to give this a little while; try a few instances. See what turns up. 😎