RE: https://aus.social/@slevelt/115874855849817583

my fedi journey, which may be insightful for new users joining through #forkiverse (and to others). tl;dr: enjoy the fediverse!

- among my community of humanities scholars on twitter, there was unease about how its algorithms were developing, and some of us were looking for alternatives. I made my first mastodon.social account in 2016, which I ended up not using very much, as there was little activity that I felt like connecting with.

- I re-joined mastodon by opening a new account at scholar.social in 2022. In the years between 2016 and 2022 an active community had developed, and scholar.social presented a reasonably welcoming starting-point, though one with quite settled habits which I am sure helped the community moderate its communications well and properly, but which could feel a little exclusionary to a newcomer. Nevertheless, I felt welcome and was grateful for the opportunity to connect and get to understand the fediverse a little.

- in November 2022, an organisation which I knew and appreciated for its support of open communication in the humanities started its own instance, hcommons.social, and with the help of feditips’ instructions I moved my account. It was a perfect environment for me, as it was less settled in its ways than scholar.social had seemed, so it felt like a community I could contribute to building, rather than one I had to conform to to fit in. I imagine this is somewhat where “the forkiverse” is right now — and for new users of the fediverse, or at least relative newbies, I would highly recommend joining such a newly establishing server of people who are congregating around shared interests. One caveat: it’s likely to be a bit of a rocky ride, as the people running your server may well be new to the software (and/or their hardware), and will have to discover a lot as they get the server going and growing! Be understanding of outages and supportive of the hard work they’re putting in.

- in 2024, I had changed careers and was no longer working as a humanities scholar, and I was preparing for migration from the UK to Australia. To help prepare for my move, I asked around for a good Australia-based instance, and was recommended aus.social. I migrated using the feditips guide, and have found many new connections helping me prepare for our move and settle once arrived, while retaining the contacts I had on my previous instance.