When it comes to instances there’s no “right” answer for everyone. Pick one that you enjoy, that you identify yourself with, that you don’t distrust the people in charge, and that is neither shitting its pants nor overly large. This site might help you with that.
I can’t recommend an app.
Define ‘weird political shit’. Because Mastodon is also full of weird political shit. The election years are unbearable.
Mastodon is also full of weird political shit.
You have been friending the wrong people.
Yeah why would you go on a microblogging platform if you didn’t want to see “weird political shit”?
Because not everyone is obsessed with politics and there is actually a lot of cool non-political content to enjoy. Although during some periods it’s better to stay away from the main feed.
I’d go for stability. Smaller instances can be slow. If you want fast load times use a bigger one, like mastodon.social
Tusky is a great droid app. And I would suggest one of the big official instances. If you hate it you can transfer your account/profile to another one. Your posts don’t transfer though.
Bluesky isn’t a terrible Twitter alternative, but it’s not federated. Mastodon is fine, but I’ve had a much harder time staying engaged there.
Bluesky does have federation, it’s just limited for now. You can host your own accounts on your own hardware.
Server doesn’t really matter much (to me), but I’m on toot.community because I’m mentally a child and like the funny name :)
App-wise, I really enjoy Moshidon, been using the nightly version for a while now: https://github.com/LucasGGamerM/moshidon
If you like Lemmy.World, why not set up the account on Mastodon.World? It’s the same admin/ops team.
I second moshidon, although I’ve just started using phanpy, which has some cool innovations. There is not nearly the wealth of Mastodon apps that we have here on Lemmy.
Megalodon is a good client, forked from a recent version of the official Mastodon app for Android (which is a fine client in itself). Megalodon also supports some extra features that some instances opt for via a forked backend, but it’s fully compatible with all instances. Here’s are some good place to find instances https://mastodon.fediverse.observer/list https://fedidb.org/software/mastodon
I don’t know about servers but moshidon is great
pick your poison here: https://joinmastodon.org/
I recommend against mastodon.social, it’s slowly turning into the old twitter.
it’s slowly turning into the old twitter.
How?
If you don’t want weird political shit, avoid the largest ones, like .social.
I am on mastodon.art which has most of the fascist distros blocked and I use Tusky. I love it.
Mastodon also has great filtering tools and temp muting so you can curate your experience pretty tightly too.
Just as a heads up: .art also blocks a lot of the pro-trans and/or furry instances as well.
How do you find out what mastodon instances block others?
In the “about” page linked at the bottom of the instance there is a section for “Moderated Servers” which may have a list of blocked and limited servers, along with reasoning.
noc.social is a small but quick server. Don’t use Android so I can’t speak to that.
And I will say that I’ve got much better engagement on Mastodon than I ever did Twitter. The people overall are kinder and more thoughtful. It’s more likely that the disrupters just aren’t there yet. Almost everyone I had followed on Twitter is on Mastodon though. May not be the same for everyone.
Tusky for client. Lots of good medium sized instances (avoid mastodon.social). I’m on mas.to for a general account and mastodon.scot for a local one (both reliable, run by the same person).
I’ve never even browed the local feed on the Masro server I’m on.
Just pick a non mainstream one that has been around for a bit ?
I use Fedilab, Megalodon and Rodent.
