Hey new people and those thinking of joining, you do NOT need to sign up on huge servers!
You can follow and interact with people on any server from any server, the servers are connected.
It would really, really help the network right now if you could sign up on medium or small size servers. You will still be able to follow and interact with whoever you want, and the network as a whole will work much better.
A good safe place for beginners to find servers to join is https://joinmastodon.org/servers
@feditips what do you mean by “safe”?
Does this imply some of the servers are not “safe”?
There are literally thousands of servers out there and more appear all the time, anyone can start their own.
It's difficult to know from a raw server list which ones are reliable.
The ones on the JoinMastodon list have committed to the "Mastodon Covenant" which has very specific requirements about reliability (multiple staff, long warning if they close etc) and responsible moderation (basically no hate speech). If they break the covenant they are removed from the list.
@feditips ok, thanks