Stupid question:
What would be the benefits moving from mastodon.social to something like oldbytes.space?

Would it be faster? Right now, Mastodon is very, very slow/unreliable in the evening hours for me. Doubt, that it's my crappy WiFi.
Would connecting with other retro heads be easier?

@3DBigBoxGames Yes--I was wondering the same thing exactly for weeks, and then did it and Mastodon is much faster. That said, not all followers transfer; some people said it was either dead accounts or the rest would come in time, but neither was true. I would still do it again. I don't think making connections is necessarily easier; it's been entirely a "site performance" thing for me, and I still follow accounts on mastodon.social and other places, even though I'm on oldbytes now.

@jlendino Following folks from various instances is of course no problem, but the local feed as well as my saved hashtag feeds are AFAIK limited to mastodon.social and thus rather limited in regard of #c64 or #retrogaming.

@3DBigBoxGames If I search "retrocomputing" in my search box on the top left, I get a bunch of hashtags and a few groups, including "#retrocomputing." When I click on that, it seems to go across instances. But searching #retrocomputing itself doesn't bring that hashtag up, which is weird. I clearly don't understand this fully. [edited to delete something about my own profile that was incorrect]

@jlendino @3DBigBoxGames Plain text searching outside your own instance is disabled by design.

It prevents dogpiles, drama, and "hatescrolling" like is present on other forms of social media.

If you want your posts to be found, hashtags should be used, as they are searchable! While it may not make sense from a classic social media view, it really helps prevent many of the kinds of toxicity you find on other services.

@yestergearpc @3DBigBoxGames Oh that's fine--What I meant is, if I search #retrocomputing I don't see the hashtag everyone is using. I have to search retrocomputing WITHOUT the hashtag in order to find the hashtag (and even then, it's far from the first entry; other accounts and hashtags appear above it). So even finding the right hashtag to follow isn't easy.

@jlendino Oh, that's odd. I can type #retrocomputing in my search bar and it just shows me everything. Perhaps it's server lag, or a misconfiguration somewhere.