It has enough traction that it’s a vibrant set of communities. I use it to share bird photos, talk about adhd/autism, and follow some climate science. Its smaller than twitter, but its big enough to work now.

Which server do you recommend?

not the GP but I've been happy on fosstodon.org. It has been reliable and I've found a lot of good people to follow on it, including the founder of MNT.

I am on Aus.social as that is a relevant country for me. It’s a left leaning instance but generally relaxed aside from the usual anti nazi moderation.

Relative to what? It currently has ~1.2M monthly active users, or less than 0.5% of Twitter. It's probably 20x the active user base of IRC.

I don't know anyone going over there, except for the couple people on Hackernews who keep saying it's the next big thing.

At this point there is enough people on Mastodon for me to stay there without caring if its “the next big” or not.

These days I'm actually more excited to find the next small thing.

Exactly. Everybody seems to look for the place "where everyone is".

Truth is that there is none. People are always spread around many different places (and it’s a good thing).

Is everybody on Mastodon ? Absolutely not (but you would be surprised how many people never were on Twitter either).

Is there enough people on Mastodon to keep you informed, entertained and making you discover new stuff? Absolutely.

Is your niche interest represented on Mastodon? I don’t know but it might be, although with different "codes/traditions" which might make it harder to find at first glance.

Will Mastodon be the next big thing? Well, nobody on Mastodon seems to care about that question.

Is Mastodon a success? Of course it is for the thousands people using it daily.

Should I use Mastodon? Only you can answer that…

It’s not the next big thing, but it’s definitely a thing now. Lots of big names in tech post there exclusively.

Including Linus Torvalds! https://social.kernel.org/users/torvalds

heh, yeah, I was going to say -- I don't use twitter and have used mastodon for years and do not expect it to become the next big thing.

is that important?

I put it like this. If you expect 1-to-1 mapping of your twitter social network and posts to mastodon to work before you switch, you will fail. Expecting that or something close to it is not unreasonable to want (okay, it's historically very unreasonable), but it is not what we have.

When I joined, I had one friend on the network. Then two, then I followed random people until I built a new social network organically over a year, and unfollowed people and now everything works nicely for me. I have a new social network, and all it really took was being willing to click follow and be patient.

It was slow though, or else would have been work, so I do get that this isn't a recommendation. It's honest though, and that will keep it from being the next big thing until everyone on Twitter is gone and the networks built from scratch are the place to be (and now more gentle to do that because you're a latecomer).

Next big thing though? Nah. I think it's a sustainable thing though, like Linux pre-smartphone, and one that doesn't need to be the next big thing to be big enough to hit perpetual improvement and growth until it does become closer to the big thing a few down the line..

We've got a lot of proprietary sites to crash and burn their VC funding by which point federated services are going to look like an oasis of stability where you can go back and find your friends when the trendy new network fails.

I don't know if mastodon will be a household name, but I bet it (or another federated service) outlasts bluesky, truth social, gab, reddit, twitter, instagram, youtube, tumblr, facebook, makes me wonder more at what point it's got a signal, email, dropbox, or online collaboration system somehow. I see no reason to think the network is boring enough that it will just peter out without active sabotage so far. Maybe everything will be more boring in this context in the future, that would be okay with me.