> Mastadon depends a lot on what instance you're on. You're community is primarily your instance and non-instance users are secondary

I don't agree with this at all. Most of my following and followers are on other instances, and that seems to be true of them too, unless you happen to be on the biggest instance mastodon.social, which has a disproportionate number of total Mastodon users, but as a result also doesn't have much of a "community" is such.

New Mastodon users, especially Twitter refugees, tend to sign up for whatever instances happen to be available for signup at the time.

It's interesting that we have such different experiences. I'm on a small instance that's mostly insular. I have a good experience anytime I'm looking at local feeds, but anytime I look at the global feed or search outside the instance the results are very low quality. I follow people outside my instance, but never ones I've discovered through Mastadon.

Any social network is what you make of it. You can choose to socialize as much or as little as you want.

Very weird that you've been on that network for so long yet you still can't spell its name. Goes to show that it was a stupid choice.

So which instance is a good one? Cause you have to pick one (or a few?) at the end of the day. I'll legit give it a try.

Last time I played with anything remotely similar to a federated social network, it was Jabber/XMPP.