I recently posted this to Boychat in reply to somebody else, I think it might be useful to others too.


Upside: Decentralized, not owned by any company, not for profit, no advertisements.

If you pick the right Mastodon instance, that is how servers are called in Mastodon, they will not ban you, they don´t scan your uploads to detect child porn like Twitter does (privacy infrigement). Anything you post to Mastodon is visible on the Internet, it can be linked to in forums, like this one.

Downside: It doesn´t have too many users, it is a catch 22 situation, people will not use Mastodon because it doesn´t have enough crowd, but it will not take off until a few determined people move to Mastodon.

Mastodon might contain stuff that is illegal in your country, a couple of instances are dedicated to lolicon, apparently run from Japan, they can not be shut down, if this is illegal in your country you need to pick an instance/server that will not contain them so that you can not download it by accident, the mainstream Mastodon instances disconnect from the servers that contain lolicon and others that contain white nationalist stuff, their users can´t see it, to make sure you do not break the law by accident, pick one of the servers that has disconnected them.

This is the main website:
https://mastodon.social/

There are hundreds of other instances, that is just the main one.

https://www.boychat.org/messages/1535424.htm