alt Hacker NewsI just tried to check out the Fediverse and found utter confusion. I'm not saying its bad-- I'm saying I am bewildered. There are communities I can join, but I can't tell how I should choose a community. I could find no way to search for communities that might be a fit. Apparently there are a lot of different kinds of social media under the broad banner of the Fediverse. How should I choose, and what are the implications of choosing?
I suppose I could pick a random community. But what's the point? I don't know.
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It’s a little wild to read comments like this because this was just how the Internet worked before Twitter got popular. I still get “happy birthday” emails from forums I joined 20+ years ago.
If you don't want to choose, install the official mastodon app. It should direct you to create an account on mastodon.social, unless you go out of your way to pick something different.
I suspect the sign up flow has changed since you last tried.
This is a big turn off for me too. I don’t want to “figure it out for myself”. That’s why I became catholic as an adult.
With the fediverse I have an overwhelming fear of missing out if I pick the wrong communities. I feel like it needs aggregation which defeats the purpose.
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.