For the most part I feel very much at home on the Hachyderm Mastodon server; it’s probably the best social media experience that I can remember having and I have had the pleasure of interacting with so many cool and impassioned people there.

Hachyderm implements the default 500 character post limit which is hard-coded into the Mastodon codebase and as of writing these, seems unlikely to ever be made configurable.

Every now and then, especially when adding summaries to long (1hr+) live programming videos that I share across the Fediverse, I come up against that limit.

While watching the implosion of Twitter in real-time over the past week, I noticed more and more people in my Twitter feed sharing links to their Mastodon accounts.

During that time, https://instances.social was posted to Hacker News as a tool to help people find a Mastodon instance to register with. My initial experience with this was quite poor.

Later in the week, a thread was started in the Rust subreddit titled “Rustaceans worth following on Mastodon?” and saw that quite a lot of people were registered on the Hachyderm Mastodon instance. After spending so long playing with the filters on https://instances.social to try to find an instance and coming away empty-handed, I decided to just bite the bullet and register an account on Hachyderm.