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Ask HN: Is there a curated catalog of Mastodon servers?

24 points by BerislavLopac ↗ HN
With the mass migration from Twitter to Mastodon, I'm curious if there is a Website where one can research which Mastodon instance to join? Not just a simple list of servers, but also who owns/administers it, does it prefer certain types of members etc - ideally searchable with tags, labels and similar...

7 comments

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input_sh
Official website does categories, language, region, legal structure, and more: https://joinmastodon.org/servers

As an added bonus servers listed on the official website come with certain "guarantees", mostly related to their maintenance (>1 person with access to the servers, daily backups, long shutdown notice and similar): https://joinmastodon.org/covenant

butz
Speaking of guarantees: I wonder how hard it would be to automate backing up your Mastodon account, when you create it on some random server? And what happens when I migrate to new server? Do I have to tell all my friends about server change?
input_sh
> And what happens when I migrate to new server? Do I have to tell all my friends about server change?

No. Assuming you have access to your old and new account and both servers are still in operation, you can effectively transfer your followers from your old account to the new one.

Personally never had a need to try it so no guarantees, but I know it's there in case I need it.

gpm
I've tried it. It worked as designed* though with a surprisingly amount of lag (it took an hour or so for all my followers to move over).

*As designed, it only automatically moves people who follow you, not the people who you follow, your bookmarks, posts, etc.

There are also import/export functions for the list of people who you follow, and your bookmarks, and some other things I think that I didn't export. Those also worked, but it un-sorted my bookmarks (which are otherwise sorted by date added). Additionally (by design) this sends a new notification to everyone that you follow, that you followed them, and it requires people who have it set so they must approve followers to re-approve you as a follower.

This wasn't a problem for me, but it also (unsurprisingly) doesn't move followers who are on an instance which has been de-federated from by your original instance.