TL:DR – There are lots of Mastodon servers, choosing the best is down to personal needs. Choose one in your niche that has a good number of users, more than one admin, and a good financial base.
If you’re new to Mastodon, then have a quick read of my Mastodon FAQ to get an idea of what it’s all about.
Social media tool Mastodon is essentially a network of connected websites all running the same software. Users refer to these websites as instances. You can think of an Instance as being a specialist group on another famous social media system. But each instance or server is owned and managed independently rather than being controlled for the benefit of a billionaire and shareholders.
Once you’re ready to grab Mastodon by the tusks you will need to choose a server or instance with which to sign up. The following list are the servers most commonly used by the people I follow.
- sciencemastodon.com
- scicomm.xyz
- mastodon.org.uk
- astrodon.social
- mastodon.me.uk
- mstdn.science
- genomic.social
- ecoevo.social
- fediscience.org
- mastodon.nz
- mastodon.green
- med-mastodon.com
- toot.wales
- aus.social
- newsie.social
- mastodon.scot
- qoto.org
- mastodonapp.uk
- masto.ai
- fosstodon.org
This list is substantially the same as when I last did an analysis of the most popular Mastodon Servers, but with a few important exceptions.
