List public servers willing to accept new members

[thibaultamartin]

Get something as user friendly as https://joinmastodon.org/servers and as complete as https://joinmatrix.org/servers/

Important aspects:

• Servers should opt-in to be listed there
• Data updates need to be automated
• "Use at your own risk, this is not endorsed by the m.org foundation" warnings need to be made, all while not being unnecessarily too scary
• Servers listed should agree to some basic principles?

The three filters joinmastodon.org has make sense to me:

• legal structure (is it an individual or an organisation I'm trusting with my account? Helps with the bus factor)
• sign-up speed (is it completely open? Are there manual reviews? Can help determine the quality of the instance and its likeliness to get banned)
• language (useful to get support from admins)

I believe it also makes sense to add a filter for whether the services are paid or free. This might be a criterion that fits in "legal structure" (e.g. "Individual admin", "Non-profit", "Paid service"). Another way to see it is to have a "Support level" filter with "Best effort (single admin)", "Best effort (team)" and "Paid service with support".

[thibaultamartin]

joinmastodon.org

pixelfed.org

joinmatrix.org (NOT controlled by the matrix.org foundation)

[MTRNord]

Another data point: this is the pad keymaker used together with the community to do something like this in an over engineered fashion. Maybe it is some use https://scalar.vector.im/etherpad/p/!bKsmsWVPSktSNkPEqf_nordgedanken.dev

[thibaultamartin]

Based on feedback from https://mamot.fr/@thibaultamartin/109432454640400772 it seems that the most important things for people when choosing a federated microblog instance are:

• Expected Longevity of the instance (based on whether they have "a team of multiple people working on it, had been around for a long time, and had enough financial reserves to run for at least six more months, with a steady income stream" and whether the instance is up to date or not).
• Server location/jurisdiction
• Rules/Code of Conduct

[austinhuang0131]

I have moved my homeserver list to https://servers.joinmatrix.org which now has a filter feature.