Wandering Adventure Party

@rufustheduck You might think of it as logging in to Everquest or something, if you've ever played any of those, and landing in the default town that all new users log in to. That's exciting and there's always a lot going on there and it's fine, but a lot of people eventually just get the itch to go somewhere else
Anyway, again, take your time. Pay attention to where other people you like are from. Check out the main webpage of interesting places and see what they have to say about themselves. Don't even think about moving to start with, just learn about different instances. Oh, and different server software is another reason. Other flavors of ActivityPub server have neat and useful features or just make life better for the moderators and admins and that in turn makes the community there better. If you get the itch, dabble with an alt somewhere. One thing at a time

@rufustheduck Hi Rufus! If you do move (think of moving as re-pointing your followers to another account on another server... maybe some day it'll be more than that but that's essentially what it is, and your posts not moving over is a big part of the downside), take your time, and you can create alt accounts on other servers and spend time checking out the local scene before making the leap. Different people habitate other instances for different reasons. Having the local timeline (one of the links on the right in the web view) reflect your interests is one reason. I joined here (bsd.network) to keep up with things and people related to the BSD Unix like operating system. Also people I knew from before I came here invited me here. For some people, their server is part of their identity. For example, you might tech.lgbt if that was a really good summary of you as a person and you wanted to hype that about yourself. People join one server or another because they like the admin and/or moderators there. It can be a friendly community affair kind of like you a bunch of people are hanging out someone else's place, but virtual. You don't need to do that to find community... you're doing fine there But that's one reason other people do. You might join an instance because you agree with the moderation decisions it makes. If you're on an instance that blocks a lot of other instances and people related to something you're interested in, you might not ever notice that unless you get off of there. A lot of people don't agree with a lot of the moderation decisions mastodon.social makes. I don't. But that's an individual decision and there are instances with worse moderation (by my standards and likely yours too). Any instance is kind of part of a subnetwork of instances that tend to block similar other instances. Like 4D space, your view can change radically depending on where you're standing. mastodon.social has on and off been the source for a lot of spam. Being the "default" instance, some other instances also just cloister themselves from it, preferring to interact with people who likewise took efforts to diversify...