This discussion thread is rife with options like Ivory, Post, etc.

That is the challenge. Musk's tantrum has made an already-solved problem for a lot of people something they now have to re-solve. I'm generally recommending Mastodon to people (and can recommend a handful of specific nodes), but nothing auto-replaces Twitter.

Point is, unfortunately, Twitter's dying and its prognosis is poor. We can imagine it'll get better but the realistic strategy is to bail.

(My previous post lacked empathy, and I apologize for that. Some billionaire asshole spent a lot of money to break something that worked for a lot of people. That's not fair to them.)

I would take those node recommendations. I've dipped my toes in, but don't have the wherewithal right now to really figure out how to find what's worth following.

- mastodon.social is the closest thing Mastodon has to a "main" node. With the pros and cons associated with that. Given the relative youth of the experiment, I'd be a little concerned about whether admins can keep up with the growth, but it's probably the best of the "no opinion" options.

- qoto.org: member of United Federation of Instances. Relatively inclusive (and has some interesting extensions running on the base Mastodon service), but not necessarily federated to all the instances mastodon.social is federated to because they don't have a strict "Nazis fuck off" policy.

- mastodon.lol: antifa / LGBTQ+ / hacker-friendly node. Strict "Nazis fuck off" policy.

- infosec.exchange: InfoSec-focused Mastodon node, but pretty open with a pretty regular policy.

I think the strategy I'd probably recommend for a new user is something like "Join at mastodon.social, follow some people, and lurk. If you see many people you like who live at a particular node, migrate to that node."

(And honestly, unless a defederation fight breaks out, 90% of nodes are pretty interchangeable with each other; you can follow anyone the node federates to so it doesn't matter over-much which node you're on unless you want some specific features or you want admins who have a particular attitude towards your bugbear-topics).

What I did was use fedifinder to find all the people I already followed on Twitter and bootstrapped my account that way. It shows you what the most common instance is among the people you follow which is a good recommendation to choose that for signup, and then you can naturally find other people to follow through their boosts.

Also you don't have to fret about what instance you start off on. I started with one of the generic instances and then after a week of lurking I migrated my account to an instance that I wanted to join (which moves over all your followers/followings but not your posts)