One of the eternal selling points of Mastodon is "If your instance isn't working for you, you can migrate your account to an instance that suits you better!"
I have literally, genuinely, fully no idea what the differences between instances are besides theming. This is a real question: in what ways could one Mastodon instance suit me in a way any other Mastodon instance doesn't? What are the differences besides "this one is for sff writers and publishers" "this one is for tech bros" etc.?
@moonspider This is a good question and sadly I don't know of a good comprehensive source for finding differences. I've been using Mastodon since 2017 but only as a user, never an admin. Some other things that come to mind:
* Emojis available
* Full-text searching (I believe a fairly new optional add-in for servers)
* Version used (some upgrade more regularly than others which will have an impact on features available)
* Stance on bots
* Number of active users
@moonspider @kiesa couple more:
- local only posting (aka posts that dont federate off your server)
- media upload limits (some instances let you post larger videos than others)
- being able to use html &/or markdown to style your posts
- whether tags are inline or a separate field
- how the instance renders different post types (for example vanilla mastodon typically displays blog posts as a subject line+link, but some instances have modified this to show the whole thing in app if available, meanwhile i believe bookwyrm drops any post that doesn’t have a book attached & also isn’t a reply)
- whether the instance shows trending hashtags, posts, or links (secondarily if & how instance admins curate said things but thats social not a code difference)
- if you’re a webuser, what the frontend looks like—some instances have modified theirs heavily, others have just done some CSS color tweaks, and many leave it completely unaltered
