[ohtwenty]

Kiiiind of, but there's quite some general instances. Most of them are more like a "here's some people interested in the same subjects as you". So yes, on my (politically motivated, I guess) instance I find quite some people with the same political slant (and some commentary on that), but many cats, daily stories, etc. Just like twitter or other platforms. It's worth a try seeing what joinmastodon.org tells you, and have a look.

[phreack]

Now I see. I looked around and it seemed hard to choose 'the right instance' to begin, knowing nothing about the platform. Most had esoteric names, like clubs. It might be a nice idea for Mastodon advocates to create general topic instances, that may feel more approachable for newcomers.

In any case, it does seem like a great platform and might blow up in time with few changes in the onboarding process

[ohtwenty]

>It might be a nice idea for Mastodon advocates to create general topic instances, that may feel more approachable for newcomers.

Yeah, the instance names are often quite silly, but there's silly people on there. I mean 3000 variations of "mastodonUKsocial.com" or something wouldn't really tell you all that much more. If you don't want to go to mastodon.social, the biggest english language instance, octodon.social is a good, smaller (~11k users) general instance with a good vibe. Fwiw i think a lot of people use twitter to follow 'their kind of people' (lgbt groups, open source fans, music people) and this codifies those groups a bit more into proper instances/servers/communities, while of course allowing you to follow other people.