The Importance of Choosing the Correct Mastodon Instance - Carl Chenet's Blog

Why is it important to choose your Mastodon home wisely? Because "You can move your user account from one instance to another, but you have to follow a special procedure which can be quite long... create another account on a new instance and import three lists... your followers, ... the accounts you have blocked [and] have muted".

[note: Carl wrote this in 2017, when there were "more than 1.5 million users on more than 2350 existing instances"].

Key issues to look for:

• server admins: look for a server run by a team, not one person.
• ideological trend: "moderation rules are described in the “about/more” page ... [but] nobody can force said administrator to follow its own rules, or not to change them on the fly"

Like many I tried to use the https://instances.social tool to choose mine, but the one I eventually chose (someone I knew was there) wasn't even listed there.

Another tool: https://observablehq.com/@easz/discover-mastodon-instances