Moving to Qoto for Mastodon
I have a new Mastodon account, @[email protected] since mastodon.host has been down since late November.
I've been using Mastodon for about a year and a half now since my original announcement post. I chose the mastodon.host instance because it claimed to "federate with everyone" (since modified to include "except Nazis and their friends") and it also had other decentralized social-media services like Peertube.
However, as I said before, it's been down for about a month. This is actually not the first time it has gone down this year for an extended period, and I no longer trust the site to stay up. If it does come back up I will immediately export my old posts for my own site (following the IndieWeb princples [Update (18 April 2021): I originally said there would be another post with more information but I don't really know how much more I can say. Read IndieWeb's site to get a sense of the motivations.]). (Hopefully that will be soon: According to someone who is apparently in contact with the operator, it's "on its way back" as of December 24. Note that the post mentions two other Fediverse instances, pleroma.site and pleroma.fr, which are operated by the same entity according to random.sh and in fact share the same IP addresses. I'm hoping that the status update extends to mastodon.host as well.)
Finding a new instance was a bit of a challenge because of policies that are common among the largest instances. First, while people on an instance can theoretically interact with those on any other, in practice instances can "suspend" other instances to prevent this. Usually, instance adminstrators suspend instances that don't properly deal with content that they consider objectionable, Gab being a prime example among many others.
But even if I don't agree with an instance's moderation practices, I still want the possibility of communicating with someone who does and has decided to use that instance, so I am wary of suspending. "Silencing" is a lesser restriction that allows interaction but prevents any content from appearing in people's feeds if they are not following an acccount on that instance, which I think is a good solution to moderating content while still maintaining network connectivity.
Second, there's a particular rule about cross-posting from other platforms that's part of the mastodon.social code of conduct: Cross-posting other people's content from other platforms is prohibited. (Mastodon.social is the canonical instance run by Mastodon's main developers and its code of conduct has been copied to some other instances.) I'm not a fan of this, especially since in "another life" I do this regularly from Twitter in order to maintain a mirroring of Twitter and Mastodon (although the Mastodon instance I use there doesn't have this rule).
I stumbled upon Qoto (qoto.org) and it seems to be what I'm looking for. It explicitly values the exchange of ideas including unpopular ones, it doesn't suspend (or "block") any instances, and it doesn't have that cross-posting rule. It claims to be "professionally hosted with nightly backups," and it even has other decentralized services like mastodon.host had. It is supposed to be "STEM-oriented" and the rules say that every member must be a "STEM student or professional," and I guess that's okay since I do talk about technology and I am a technology professional. So this will be my new home on Mastodon.
