Choosing a Mastodon server isn't like choosing an email provider, because, back when email was new and unfamiliar, you didn't choose. You just got given a mailbox by your university or employer or ISP.
By the time that independent email providers were really taking off, you had clear, concrete reasons for your choice, such as price (Hotmail), brand recognition (Yahoo!), features (GMail). But Mastodon servers all look kind-of the same, so how do you select one?
It was a left! I'll be wearing odd gloves from now on, which, whilst not ideal, is definitely an improvement on having one cold hand.
discovered this preference today, and wish I had found earlier because wow is it annoying to be prompted to login to all sorts of random sites
With the recent spike in fediverse activity, I wonder if now would be a good time for someone to set up a https://joinmobilizon.org/en/ or https://gancio.org/ instance to replace the sadly missed http://livebrum.co.uk/ local event listings site.
This used to be built in to the Mastodon UI, but got removed because users found it too confusing (https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/8127). Let's hope they figure out a way to re-add it, because the current process for following someone on another instance is uncomfortably clunky.
Want to be able to click on those web+mastodon:// links you sometimes see? Browse to your Mastodon web interface, hit F12, then enter the following into the JavaScript console:
navigator.registerProtocolHandler("web+mastodon", new URL("/intent?uri=%s", document.location.origin), "Mastodon");
Click allow on the banner that pops up.