Muensterland.Social – a new Instance joined.

Have been thinking about new and better Instance. [Part 2]

This morning, I wrote this Toot at a new instance, which I found and registered at late last night.

And picture of my busy Tabs list in #Waterfox browser showed that I really was looking for some good GlitchSocial instances.

Found a nice one, here. Muensterland.social came up in my search, from one of those tabs in the header banner.

Thank you, 🐘nipos@muensterland.social ! 😺

#MarkDown love for me. #xp #glitchsocial

Glitch-Social — Instances List is Needed!

I HAD been intensively searching for a list (non-existant, afaik) of GlitchSocial instances. They tend to be blended in with generic mastodon ones (no thanks), so it was quite a chore.

[ parenthesis : I WILL provide that as soon as possible, there is a need ]

And then, what happened ?

My search went into late last night.

Now I am writing this page, to document and describe not only the process, but mainly the Why — the reasons which lead me to look for alternatives in Fediverse, what they can offer, etc.

Why look for a change?

I am REALLY committed to leaving Mastodon behind and moving to better platforms.

GlitchSocial is one, Pleroma is another, I have accounts in BOTH types of instances, and love their added features, design improvements, and many, many new things.

The Pleroma FE (front end, or user interface — Intro Guide here) is a bit unusual for a mastodon user – but it HAS a second choice of Client; many pleroma instances have the GlitchSocial Web client as an option, sometimes as a link in their Front pages even.

For those of us who like to Read The Friendly Manual, there's a detailed Pleroma FE Guide here.

These notes now appear in a polished Web Magazine here. I developed various pages as extensions of toots and conversations had in various instances; one of the reasons I love having various accounts and always looking for interesting ones to try. #FediReporter I am...

How did I find it ?

One of the search tabs I had open (quite hard to locate a List of GlitchSocial instances, when you need one), showed a page which is Nick's Blog and mentioned this new mastodon service he was bringing online.

Got my attention, quickly! Lots to like...

We had planned putting online a new Mastodon instance for a long time but then we saw that a small German instance would go offline soon and decided to take it over.

Continuing an existing service and making sure that all existing users don't lose their digital home is much better than creating a completely new service out of the nothing.

You can find the instance at Muensterland.social but it's mainly meant for people near Muenster and most posts are in German.

Interesting — a thoughful admin is important, and he seems a good one. And it gets Better.

Using GlitchSocial and allowing 5,000 characters for Toots!

The instance runs with the GlitchSocial software (Git repo) which is a fork of Mastodon which allows more settings for users as well as server admin.

For example GlitchSoc makes the 5000 chars limit instead of 500 chars possible [the usual and pesky Mastodon limit] and that's important for having real conversations and not just a short message.

Wow. To have support for larger Toots and messages is ESSENTIAL for my self expression. I have campaigned for about 6 months now, and it's an uphill battle, to tell you the Truth. Why?

My Response to that? Screw your 500 Hard Limit!

Ha, ha, ha, thanks God and some illuminated beings, we DO have instances in mastodon and elsewhere that DO allow more than 500 Characters. Qoto.org has 65,535 characters max limit, a generous allowance even for a very verbal writer.

( I have personally used up about 5,000 tops, I would say. In extreme cases, so this limit is a God-send, yes please. )

And then, the Closer :

A few lines down, this gem :

Additionally we do now have a #Halcyon instance at web.Muensterland.social so you can use it with the easy and beautiful design of Twitter.

Muensterland.social runs on a HP ProLiant DL380 G6 server with two Intel Xeon Quad Core CPUs,32GB memory and 4x72GB RAID5 HDDs so there is still much space for new users.

For a geek like me, the server description was saliva inducing. OMG. I want in, thank you!

Halcyon's Client — Main Features :

Nick is using the well-regarded Halcyon mastodon and Pleroma client. A screenshot below (reduced in size) shows Eugen's account at Mastodon.social as rendered in Halcyon. [img source – Halcyon]

From the homepage for Halcyon :

Looks good, and can be tried without hassle or expense.

Halcyon's Additional Resources :

Famous Last Words :

I would like to sincerely thank all the dedicated people who put in a lot of effort, time and resources in providing us all the Software, the Instances and Content for the Fediverse.

It's thanks to them that we can enjoy a rich experience, the freedom to move and find communities we enjoy, and the ability to ignore or even shut the door in the varied annoyances that Internet living has those days (a subject to another post, another day).

Please visit and see new content at your friendly #FediReporter home at TeDomum.net

Originally partially posted at Qoto.org, with many thanks for excellent services and a refined user experience.

#wordCount : 1333 words, 8,021 characters used. Thank you qoto.org for a HIGH limit allowance. [note that this is the actual MarkDown source for this page, and includes tons of URLs and Formatting code.]

#QotoJournal #webstories #Fediverse #Culture

Follow Blog via your Fediverse/Mastodon account :

@rgx@write.tedomum.net

This page created entirely in MarkDown language. Thank you for reading, feel free to comment about this post – reach me at my Writer's Lounge.

R.G. @rgx@muensterland.social ^—top of page