I always grab an ID on a new social media site.
It helps to reduce the chance that bad actors will try to impersonate me.
@gshevlin
In the past, I did that for trade names of businesses I operate. My personal name is not so uncommon, so if someone were to try to impersonate me they would have to use additional identifiers.
@Priestess My family name is very rare, so I cannot hide amongst a plethora of (say) Brad Smiths.
Mastodon is the biggest culprit of multiple usernames exact same spelling - albeit each one on different servers/instances - loadsa impersonates
@gshevlin @Priestess I've used this before gives you list of all instances with user count and status count
/nosanitize
https://instances.social/list#lang=en&allowed=&prohibited=&min-users=&max-users=
That's a list of all English language instances
You can tweak it as you see fit
@ecksmc @Priestess That site is amusing, because the search criteria facility does not work properly.
It seems that the generic Mastodon server mastodon.world has the most users at 2+m.
@gshevlin @Priestess not used it for number of years myself - used to work okay
Mastodon.world - thought mastodon.social, and mstdn.social, had the largest active users and second largest << used to be again though been a few years since I checked stats for over there
i do mind though Mastodon's largest instance, mastodon.social, needed capacity upgrades to handle new load a while back
Here's another "tool" I also used before
@ecksmc @Priestess One of the downsides of federation.
I wonder how the size of CoSo compares these days to the biggest individual Mastodon Federation site?