For anyone who wants an invitation to join mastodon.online, let me know! Like mastodon.social, it is one of the two official communities run by the Mastodon non-profit. The difference is that mastodon.online is invite-only.
Joining an invite-only server helps keep out spammers who target mastodon.social and lets someone be part of a more exclusive community. This can help someone have a better-quality mastodon experience, overall.
Of course, to keep out scammers, the invitation isn’t open to just anyone who asks, they will have to have a posting history of some sort.
If you want to follow specific organizations, unfortunately, there aren’t as many on Mastodon as on other social media platforms. Some are accessible through Threads.net federation, like @theonion@threads.net, through the Bluesky bridge, or via other non-Mastodon federated communities (e.g., Flipboard.com) if that’s something you’re interested in.
However, some communities do wall themselves off from bots and bad actors. For example, the most popular Mastodon instance (mastodon.social) blocks the second-largest instance (pawoo.net). Other instances, like mastodon.art, defederate from AI art supporting instances, while others like hachyderm.io has defederated from Threads.net. Additionally, some Mastodon communities, like Truth Social, are entirely isolated and defederate from everyone else.
So, if you want access to the widest range of communities, you may need to join more than one instance.
this comment is how I learned Truth Social was based on Mastodon.
It sounds as though there’s a lot more to these new setups than I had initially thought, this might take a bit of reading just to pin down the basics. Thanks for the detailed response, much appreciated, those links are going to come in handy.