[allan-a]

Just a small note, you can't really choose wrong because you can participate across the fediverse, with other "servers", and even non-mastodon federated social media. However if it irks one to join a specific community, there does exist general purpose instances.

[DavidSJ]

If I can’t choose wrong then why am I forced to choose at all? The user experience doesn’t add up.

[afiori]

The "not choosing" option is to run your own instance.

You are forced to chose because there is not a central blessed server that acts as a main hub.

[lrvick]

You chose an area code for your phone number. Often people choose area codes from a home state as a bit of nostalgia or affinity, but in the end you can use any number to talk to any number, so it really does not matter much.

In Mastodon you can choose a french server if you are french and agree with generally accepted french values of moderation, or you can choose a general purpose server, or host your own.

There are a lot of LGBT servers and special interest servers with strict moderation, and general purpose servers that moderate very little.

It is also a bit like choosing what city to live in... except it is -much- easier to move if you decide you do not like the vibe and wish to live somewhere else. Mastodon has built-in user forwarding to take your follows and followers with you.

[xaduha]

Who should decide it for you then? Did someone mention blockchain already?

But seriously though, if you start to make it more distributed than it already is it will look even less like Twitter.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tox_(protocol)

[arjvik]

If there's no wrong answer between Gmail and Outlook, why must you choose one of them?

[neogodless]

I haven't figured out this part. I joined the default server years ago. All of the other servers want a unique account, as I cannot login using my existing account.

How do I "participate across the fediverse" without creating one account per server? Is there a part of the UI I just haven't stumbled on yet?

[lrvick]

You cannot use your gmail credentials to login to yahoo, but you can communicate with anyone from yahoo with your gmail account.

Similarly servers do not share credentials, but you can follow people no matter what server they are on.