Hello everyone,
Mastodon is not new, but the rumours of Musk’s acquisition of Twitter are causing many people to look for alternatives.
In 2019, I looked at Mastodon and there were already some well-known Nextcloud users there. In 2022, the URL https://mastodon.social prompts me to join a community first.
Which one are you in? Where can you be found?
Which community can you recommend to me?
Greetings,
Mark
Mastodon Technology should be a good starting community. You can also follow, federate, and interact with them from the social server you linked.
That is a common practice for most communities to ask someone to join before they can read user posts, but not all. Every instance might have different rules and different federation permissions. Note that Mastodon.social is the largest instance of Mastodon by far, but you do not have to use it since any federated account will connect to all of the others.
There are a lot of sites online that track instances as well as the overall fediverse of ActivityPub servers (Mastodon, Pleroma, Friendica, Hubzilla, etc.) There is a lot going on between the many many kinds of servers!
I personally recommend you join a librehost, which are communities dedicated to using a 100% gnu/linux stack. This means they are using zero data mining tools for analaytics, monitoring and everything they offer is a community project - Nextcloud, Mastodon, etc. Many of these groups are often 501c3 non-profit and live entirely off of donations, which they will share with open source developers of the projects they host.
librehosters is a network of cooperation and solidarity that uses free software to encourage decentralisation through federation and distributed platforms. Our values connect transparency, fairness and privacy with a culture of data portability and public contributions to the commons.
I just started using Mastodon this week, so I’ll be reading along here. You can find me at the mastodon.online instance, @daphnemuller@mastodon.online
Some of the Nextcloud developers are there as well
Some year ago I started an inofficial fediverse-account to see how it works.
So when Musk succeeded buying twitter I decided to make an official account at mastodon… I chose the “official” founder’s network mstdn.social . Yesterday.
What a real pity that social-app seems to be discontinued 
you mean the Nextcloud social app? or what social app are you referring to?
I agree, but I also notice that the social app fails to do it’s most important function…
It won’t actually help us share files and folders to Mastodon and other ActivityPub users as we can currently share to Facebook, Twitter, in Talk, or by Email. The focus on Social has instead been to re-create Mastodon… but we are still not able to simply share a file or folder to Mastodon in a more introverted and practical way (from Nextcloud directly) than having to use yet another chat platform with bells and whistles.
tldr Social is trying to re-create Mastodon, when all we Nextcloud users might want is to share a link to that platform without leaving the share menu. 
Frank did mention on his social media that he is considering to give it some more water and love, so fingers crossed!
Another way we could accomplish better integration between Nextcloud and Mastodon is with RSS feeds or webhooks.
And, you have many great tools available to make this process easier like feed2toot.
Platforms like Mastodon fully support both options! Not to mention Slack, Matrix, Discord, and every other major service out there.
I reccomend Ăśber - digitalcourage.social.
It has a speciality: It costs 1€/month, but that also means it is not going to get into financial trouble due to server costs, like some other smaller instances did.
I would not recommend signing up to one of the bigger Instances.
Far too many people just choose the instance of the developers https://mastodon.social, which costs their admins a lot of resources and time and we do not want centralization, thats the whole point of the Fediverse 
I am on the official instance of BĂĽndnis 90/Die GrĂĽnen https://gruene.social, but that is for party members only