I inspected the mastodon.social website
Kind of off topic, but like the author I was looking at Mastodon yesterday (reading the ruby code, ha ha!).  One thing struck me, though.  The documentation seems to imply that it doesn&#x27;t matter what instance you&#x27;re on and to simply look for an instance that has people you get along with.  However that doesn&#x27;t seem to be a good idea in some cases and I&#x27;m wondering if I&#x27;m wrong.<p>Some instances are blocked by other instances.  And even though some are only &quot;silenced&quot;, if you happen to join an instance that is blocked by a lot of other instances, then nobody will see what you are writing.  For example, I joined mstdn.jp because it&#x27;s in Japan (which I am as well), and it&#x27;s popular.  I thought it would be convenient to join that instance because then I can follow more Japanese people and improve my Japanese.  But then I found out that mstdn.jp is blocked by some other instances due to fears over lolicon material (it hasn&#x27;t shown up in my brief troll of the federated feed, so I wonder how prevalent it actually is -- also, I wonder if my information is old news and it isn&#x27;t actually blocked by people now...).<p>So potentially anything I write will never show up in the federated feed in those other instances (and may be completely blocked by other instances).  So I should pick a different instance.  Sounds easy, but which one?<p>The problem is that (as I mentioned earlier), I <i>want</i> to follow content on the main Japanese servers.  So I need to find a server that doesn&#x27;t block those servers entirely.  Except there doesn&#x27;t seem to be any way to find out exactly what servers people are blocking (except for a handful who helpfully tell you that they are following the tootcafe blocklist[1]).  That kind of solves my particular problem because the main Japanese servers are not blocked on that list.<p>But, for me it illustrates a pretty serious problem.  How do I know that the instance I&#x27;m on isn&#x27;t blocked by the majority of the fediverse?  If I&#x27;m writing and I&#x27;m interested in a wide variety of people reading what I&#x27;m writing, how do I ensure that I position myself in the right place?  And if I like an instance (regardless of a lack of moderation that is causing it to be blocked by the world), how do I remain connected with the people on that instance without maintaining a presence there?<p>It almost seems to me that I really need multiple accounts on multiple instances to ensure that I can get what I want -- but since the client is tied to the instance (as a web sever), that&#x27;s a difficult trick...<p>Sorry for the length (for people who got this far).  My ideas are still a little unformed.<p>[1] - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;tootcafe&#x2F;blocked-instances" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;tootcafe&#x2F;blocked-instances</a>