So there appears to be a HUGE influx of new mastodon users. Any idea where this is coming from? Was it media.

@freemo It’s the continuing Twitter squeeze on 3rd party clients and their own tightly-controlled client that makes me wonder if I’ll stay there and if I can find what I want here (frankly, I’m skeptical about the latter... its the QWERTY effect).

@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.

@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. 😎

@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.