How did you get that 'good sense' with forums back in the day? I did that by reading into the community. Just look around on the server, see the posts on there, and see if there's a connection. You can do that with Mastodon servers too. And it's not that high stakes. You are not stuck on that server, if you find out that it's not quite the right fit, you can move to another server. In fact, if I were to look at my following list, I think I see more people from outside the mastodon server I joined than people from the same server.

For forums you can look at them for a minute or less and figure it out. It's same with HN and sub-reddits. They are information dense and don't require signing up or customization to figure out if you can curate them into something you might like.

Compare that to mastodon, step 1 is pick a server https://joinmastodon.org/servers Very few are actually topic focused. Even the ones with themes have a lot of deviation. Even picking the popular safe choice - https://mastodon.social/ , I can't tell if I would ever like it. I don't like what I normally see but considering I can see 2 posts at a time and a significate portion are animals or other topics I wouldn't visit a forum about, it doesn't feel like I would.

And the animal thing is common across most of the servers. I understand it, I have dogs. But it's a side effect of the medium not having a coherent focus. It feels like I'd have to spend so much time to turn it into something that I'd like that I'd be better off staying with forums.

Mastodon seem great if you want to follow people and be social which is kind of the point of social media. I want to follow areas of interest, not people.

How did you choose the provider of your email address?

For Mastodon, you can check https://joinmastodon.org/servers to figure out what server you want to join. But joining one server doesn't mean you can't access people and communities from other servers. It's one big network, but with many different access points (the mastodon servers), each access point has their own niche. These access points each can have their own rules, so be sure to read them before joining.

What the point of joining the fediverse is, I can't answer that for you, that's different for everyone. The only thing I can tell you is that there's a wealth of information available there.

I run my own mail server, thank you.

“It’s one big network” People say that as if its meaning is self evident. I don’t know what that means. Does it mean that I can do one search and find anything on any server? If it’s one big network, why does it matter what server I choose?

You could run your own Fediverse server.

Can you do one search on one server, and find any email address that exists anywhere? (not that I know of)

Can you send email regardless of what server the email lives on? (with some exceptions, but mostly yes)

Federation is not infinite or unlimited, so no, there is no "one search to rule them all" within the confines of a single instance. (But then there's no way to access all email, or search all email addresses across mail servers to find someone.) Still if you're on an instance, and go out and find people on the internet that interest you, regardless of how you find them or what instance you are on, you can follow them, and their content will begin to be federated into your feed, on the instance you use.

The server you choose matters, but it's also not something you can't change. (Like getting a new email address.) If you use Gmail, but someone uses a mail server that has been blacklisted because of bad players using a domain name or IP address, you probably can't get email sent from those servers.

But initially, you can either go with the biggest instance, or the first one you see on https://joinmastodon.org/servers that seems fine and then try it out for a while. It's not a single decision you have to make for the rest of your life. It's just something new, and a new way to have access to some people connected to each other through some instances, topics, follows, etc.

Thanks for the deep response.

I don’t want to run my own server. But perhaps there is a server I want to join. There seems to be no clear way to search for them. You are referring to Mastodon, but the Fediverse is not just Mastodon.

Certainly. I have dipped my toes in a few other Fediverse pools.

Of course, like email / domain names, there's no universal search for picking them. Big ones get network affects or advertise. Small players have to be found organically.

https://github.com/emilebosch/awesome-fediverse

That's a big flippin' list of Fediverse networks. But "a clear way to search" being layered on top of "decentralized" and "anyone could theoretically bring up a server at any time"... there's always going to be friction.

Whether you join any of them... well that's up to you to decide if you're curious enough, you suspect there's value there, etc.

The monetization and network affects of corporate social networks has always lent itself to incentivizing popularity contests and "emotional" content that pulls people in. If you want to escape the bad sides of those, there's also compromises on the independently funded networks.

The president of the United States literally said that they were going to get Greenland, one way or another.

If I were to say "I'm going to get Dionian's house, one way or another" would you not prepare yourself for an invasion?

This is bad news for streaming platforms like Dropout, that use Vimeo as their backend.