I've joined mastodon to leave twitter for various reasons. Is #qoto a good place for meeting other scientists? What about finding papers?
@dbergkamp There are several arXiv bots that once a day list all kinds of papers published (during that day, I suppose). Check the Local timeline every night (European time) or just follow them.
As for being a good place for meeting other scientists, I assume it is, but now you have to think in Fediverse terms. That means that your choice of instance is not that important in terms of who is in it. You can meet scientists in other instances, too. For that, you should check the Federated timeline or, much better option, follow (and use) your favourite hashtags.
So, what makes your choice of instance significant? First, its features. For example, qoto has a bigger character limit than other Mastodon instances; it also lets you quote-post and use Markdown and LaTeX in your posts. And it is a free speech instance, which means that we federate with everybody and you curate your own experience (for the most part. We do have rules, of course, but we usually don't need to enforce them).
Anyway, welcome to qoto and the Fediverse.
@dbergkamp probably the best way to find papers is to follow some relevant people in the field (there is hashtag filtering, but it does not automagically fetch all relevant posts ;) It is a bit tricky to find people to follow, you can sift through the [trunk](https://communitywiki.org/trunk) or check one of science-themed instances, OTTOMH besides qoto I can name a few: scicomm.xyz, fediscience.org, mathstodon.xyz. You can append /public to urls to see the local timeline of the instance. Good luck!
