When it comes to instances there’s no “right” answer for everyone. Pick one that you enjoy, that you identify yourself with, that you don’t distrust the people in charge, and that is neither shitting its pants nor overly large. This site might help you with that.
I can’t recommend an app.
I’d go for stability. Smaller instances can be slow. If you want fast load times use a bigger one, like mastodon.social
If you don’t want weird political shit, avoid the largest ones, like .social.
I am on mastodon.art which has most of the fascist distros blocked and I use Tusky. I love it.
Mastodon also has great filtering tools and temp muting so you can curate your experience pretty tightly too.
If you like Lemmy.World, why not set up the account on Mastodon.World? It’s the same admin/ops team.
I second moshidon, although I’ve just started using phanpy, which has some cool innovations. There is not nearly the wealth of Mastodon apps that we have here on Lemmy.
Megalodon is a good client, forked from a recent version of the official Mastodon app for Android (which is a fine client in itself). Megalodon also supports some extra features that some instances opt for via a forked backend, but it’s fully compatible with all instances. Here’s are some good place to find instances https://mastodon.fediverse.observer/list https://fedidb.org/software/mastodon
pick your poison here: https://joinmastodon.org/
I recommend against mastodon.social, it’s slowly turning into the old twitter.
it’s slowly turning into the old twitter.
How?
Tusky for client. Lots of good medium sized instances (avoid mastodon.social). I’m on mas.to for a general account and mastodon.scot for a local one (both reliable, run by the same person).
wetdry.world (/hj)
noc.social is a small but quick server. Don’t use Android so I can’t speak to that.
And I will say that I’ve got much better engagement on Mastodon than I ever did Twitter. The people overall are kinder and more thoughtful. It’s more likely that the disrupters just aren’t there yet. Almost everyone I had followed on Twitter is on Mastodon though. May not be the same for everyone.
I don’t know about servers but moshidon is great
Lemmy.world and Connect have been working great for me on multiple Android phones.
I use connect for lemmy, i didn’t know it has Mastodon integration
Lemmy and Mastodon are partially interoperable. Mastodon users can post to Lemmy by tagging a community, and can reply to Lemmy posts. Mastodon users can follow Lemmy communities, but the UX is pretty rough. Lemmy users cannot follow Mastodon users.
I’m on a local Scottish instance called
glasgow.social
because the admin is relaxed about free speech without allowing it to become a total cesspool. Almost got kicked offtreehouse.systems
before I migrated because I suggested political violence was bad - even if left wing people were doing it.App wise I recommend just using the progressive web app (install website as app). It works very well, and you always get the latest updates.
For the server, find one that targets one of your interests.
Fedilab is a killer app I mainly use. Also as for server ur gonna have to do some digging to find one specifically tailored to your needs 😂
Dunno how to answer your question BUT X-twitter was always political. It’s worse now because of the upcoming elections, AND if Elon is actually going to be a part of the government it’ll be a raging dumpster fire. Good luck, OP.