Due to the demand in the last view days, many of the earlier Mastodon instances — including the “flagship” instance at mastodon.social — have benn closed temporarily to avoid getting overloaded. Thanks to federation, this is not a big deal, there are literally hundreds of alternatives out there. However, this only brings a new challenge: Which instance to choose?

This is not a trivial matter, as (as has been pointed out also elswhere): You trust your instance operator not to read your private toots and details and not to go away suddenly, as this means you’ll lose your account and need to start from scratch.

There is tooter.today, which recommends an instance to choose, but frankly their choice of prioritising small instances (of about 60 active users) does not seem to be the best approach in my opinion to address the concerns above. So, which instances do I recommend for new users?

Currently, I would choose one of the following:

• social.weho.st - They are a great team from the Netherlands working on an ambitious project to provide Matrix, Nextcloud, VPN etc. for their members and have now also set-up a public Mastodon.
• mastodon.zaclys.com - This is the Mastodon instance from Mère Zaclys, a French non-profit providing various open web services (Nextcloud, photo galleries etc.) to their members that has been around for a long time already.
• social.tchncs.de - This one technically does not belong on this list, as it is also currently closed for registrations. As its admin has hinted at reopening registrations soon, however, I still wanted to recommend it. The whole tchncs.de universe has been around for a while now, as well, and seems to be a good choice for me.

This list is not based on any hard stats or a fancy ranking formula, but on my personal “gut feeling”. I would thus recommend to take it with a grain of salt, but if one Mastodon instance seems just like any other for you, maybe this recommendation can help.