For anyone considering which instance to join, the section "Tell me more about this magical community-building feature you love" in this post [1] and the sectio

For anyone considering which instance to join, the section "Tell me more about this magical community-building feature you love" in this post [1] and the section after that "What should I look for in an instance to join?" have pretty useful information that explains the subtleties beyond "federation works like email". It explained a lot of things about content visibility that confused me for a long time. There's also a tool [2] that lets you preview what the Local (within-instance) and Federated ("all" instances, though not really, as the mentioned post explains) timelines look from each instance. Keep in mind that you can always filter out users or whole instance domains, so the presence/visibility of interesting posts is more important to look for than the absence of a few spammy/non-your-language accounts. [1] https://wordsmith.social/elilla/a-futuristic-mastodon-introduction-for-2021 https://wordsmith.social/elilla/a-futuristic-mastodon-introd... [2] http://www.unmung.com/mastoview?url=qoto.org&view=local http://www.unmung.com/mastoview?url=qoto.org&view=local