| HN Mirror

> us techies kinda get Mastodon is not a single place like Twitter so the only explanation for not saying "I moved from Twitter to such or such community" is not wanting people to know.

Eh? There are _some_ Mastodon instances which are to some a community distinct from Mastodon writ large, but that's not most of them. I moved from Twitter initially to mastodon.online (one of the giant ones, not really a community at all), then to mastodon.ie (the generic Ireland one; marginally a community, but only very marginally), and reserve the right to move further if appropriate. But I don't see why anyone would care about the distinction between them, really.

Generally, I would assume it's less not wanting people to know, and more that it's irrelevant detail. I think this is maybe a common point of confusion over Mastodon; for most people, for most purposes, the instance _simply does not matter_. There are some generally very small instances which are highly focused on specific communities (and may even require that user content revolves largely around those communities) but those are rare; I'd expect under 1% of the user ship. For most people Mastodon is the community, not their instance.

If someone says "I used to do business mostly by post and fax, but now do it mostly by email" you wouldn't go "ah, but are you using gmail or hotmail? It must be a conspiracy because you don't want to tell us!" They don't name the email provider because it is _irrelevant_.