Tech can be weird sometimes. An instance i follow here was showing me almost nothing for quite a while, and now I'm seeing its posts, suddenly. Glad of it, I just don't get why now.

@lynnskyi an entire instance?

That could be for a number of reasons.

They could have completely blocked Mastodon.social until now.

Also if you didn't follow a user's account on that instance, their posts won't be pulled unless someone else on your follows them.

Fediverse works by follow relationships.

@BeAware I follow a few people on the instance. I don't think Mastodon Social blocked it because it's noncontroversial, so who knows. some instances require you to have an account there before you can see the content, so at first I thought that was it, but obviously not so.

@lynnskyi I was thinking they blocked mastodon.social until now

Mastodon.social is a pretty controversial instance.

However if you were following them before, that's probably not the case.

@BeAware Is it? Hmm! I don't really look at the local timeline here, so I would be the last to know.

@lynnskyi since it has 2 million users, moderation is just not great.

There's bad stuff from new accounts every day and it takes time for them to go away.‍️

@BeAware Oh, that makes sense. I've been on a few instances, and so I decided I'd like to be on a more general instance, one not mostly blindness or disability oriented. I just figured Mastodon Social, being the flagship instance, would be a good choice. I wasn't even thinking about moderation.

@lynnskyi it may work well for you. It's just that a lot of other instances block it for that reason.

But you might not even notice because you wont see them. Your mileage may vary.

@lynnskyi and I just used the word "see" and your blind.

I'm bad at these things. Lol sorry.

@BeAware Hmm! Mostly I use lists, so yeah I probably wouldn't know. I suppose the same happens with Mastodon World and some others too?

@lynnskyi they aren't owned by Mastodon Gmbh (the company) so they get way less users.

I'd say Mastodon.world and mstdn.social are good alternatives, but I'm not 100% sure.

@BeAware Okay! That's good to know. I know, at least when I was searching for a good general instance, Mastodon World wasn't accepting any new users. I also wish instances would display their character limit. That would be very helpful.

@lynnskyi I agree regarding the character limit and any other info that makes them different from other instances.

@BeAware I don't need millions of characters, but 500 is too few when posting about books, as I so often do. And I don't have the technical skills to host my own instance.

@lynnskyi well, maybe you will get some recommendations. I don't browse instances because I am one of those nerds with their own instance.

I do hope you eventually find a good place for you though. It's hard sometimes, I know.

@BeAware Good for you. I'm okay here. The only thing that bugs me is that when the instance is down for software updates, they don't seem to announce it.

@lynnskyi I bet that's annoying. Though, being they're owned by the company, I'd hope it wouldn't be down for very long.

@BeAware They haven't been down for too long, but it leaves me wondering, when this happens, if I have no Internet, or if my Mastodon client, Mona, is down or what. It's just confusing.

@lynnskyi oh yeah. I have this sort of learned behavior that when I notice something not working, I immediately go to Google.

Google doesn't go down very often, so its usually a pretty easy giveaway.

Though, a notice from the admins would be quite nice.

I feel like it's an unfortunate example of the instance being "too big to care", if that makes sense.

Like they're inconveniencing a few hundred thousand at the same time, so they have this dumb thought of "they can't all possibly complain if everyone was having the same issue."

@BeAware All they'd have to do is have an annoucement account. Problem solved.