It’s not pointless - the original poster sees that you’ve ‘favourited’ their post, so it shows your appreciation.
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I suppose ‘pointless’ was a bit harsh. What I mean is that over on Twitter, the Mighty Algorithm also uses ‘liked post’ to then show posts with more interactions (likes) to other people - meaning that it’ll get more views.
Over on Mastodon, the only way for a post to ‘go viral’ is if everyone reading it actually retoots the message manually themselves.
That’s most likely intentional and how I personally prefer it.
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Yep - it’s basically the difference between:
‘I like this’
and
‘I like this and I think my followers would like to read it too’
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That’s what ‘boosting’ is for 
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Yes, I know Adrian has been trying to sort something out
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I’m on infosec.exchange. The guy who runs it seems to know what he’s doing and seems committed to it. Not sure if new regs are open currently.
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I signed up at mas.to.
Been messing around for the past couple of days and quite liking it, now that I’ve found a decent number of people to follow.
Also signed up for Pixelfed, more out of interest in testing ActivityPub.
Quite liking the fediverse.
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It’s taken some time but I’m starting to get a very active feed and an increasing number of followers, even though I’m on my own instance.
It appears that the thing to do is follow, boost (“re-tweet”) and favourite (“like”) whenever you see something interesting. You can always prune your followers/following lists further down the line.
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I was looking into setting up my own instance, but my limited understanding is that this would likely result in a dramatically reduced Local and Federated timelines (by design).
This could be totally fine, but right now one of my big issues is discovery and I’m finding both of theses timelines quite useful.
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TestFight slots for Ivory beta opening up in a couple of mins.
Ah damn, wish I’d seen in time 
Yes. I was a Tweetbot user for years, mainly to avoid all the ads and unwelcome promoted stuff on Twitter. I’m not sure why I would want to use Ivory, though, especially at £14.99 per year.
I find the official free Mastodon iOS client covers everything I need in a Mastodon app.
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So yes, it’s been quite a while since we last discussed Mastodon - is anyone still using it?
I’ve now had ‘my fingers burnt’ twice by the ‘volunteer’ nature of Mastodon admins by setting up and settling into a server, only for them to either just announce they’re closing it down and having to move or for something to technically go wrong with it and not be able to login and after a week it’s not been fixed.
The other week, after the latest announcement from xtwitter that they were scrapping being able to block people I decided to just cancel my account with them and deleted the account and apps completely and I was going to be more active on Mastodon - but I think this is just the sign I needed to decide just to forget about these sort of platforms completely and move on.
I was mainly using Twitter just to procrastinate from work so I might even be a bit more productive! lol! I never used to use Twitter that much before lockdown and WFH.
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Yes, still running my own Mastodon instance. Not missing X/Twitter at all and haven’t had a Meta account for years now.
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I still use mastodon and so far still really enjoying it. It seems more chilled out than some of the other platforms and so far my instance seems to be coping with the influx of new people. I’m on one of the generic ones https://mas.to
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Yes, the larger instances are generally safer for the long term. Many people say that you should choose a smaller instance because it’s more cosy, but that doesn’t make sense unless you spend a lot of time looking at your federated time line. Your default (Home) timeline is going to be the same whichever instance you are on.
The servers listed here have signed up to an agreement which includes giving at least 3 months’ notice if they intend to close:
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Might be worth looking at the Servers - Mastodon list if you haven’t already. There’s the ‘Mastodon Covenant’ that covers those where the admins have agreed to communicate if they plan to shut down with at least 3 months notice, to give you time to backup, export all your stuff etc before they close.
Unfortunately as we’ve seen with the elonsphere it’s not any better and is happy to nuke your old memories without telling you.
(Edit - pipped to the post by mikez!)
Also not sure if people here have seen but the ‘instances’ term is being deprecated in favour of server as they agreed that it was confusing and offputting to other people when in most cases ‘server’ is accurate enough for end users 
Yes - old habits die hard, though
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Interestingly, maybe, but I’m sure when I had to move from my old mastodon server because the person running it had decided to quit, I went to the join mastodon page to find another suitable one. But the one I choose is not currently listed on there.
I really don’t remember spending too long searching for a new server - I would’ve gone with the quickest and most straightforward option which would’ve been picking one from this list.
Whilst they’ve all signed ‘The Covenant’ I wonder what guarantee that actually gives. Presumably if an admin decides to just quit, they’ll just take themselves out of this server list anyway and then close it down.
FWIW, the current issue I have is not that the server has closed down (as far as I can tell) it’s just that the SSL certificate for it appears to have expired and not been renewed and it’s been a week - so I’m assuming no-one can access it (Chrome and Edge now really do just block you for even attempting to access a site without a https connection).