See also: Code of Conduct.
Game developers and people interested in game development!
Our expectation is that people on this instance are game developers or somehow related to that field. So you can probably expect a lot of the local timeline to be about topics related to games, such as art, design, production, prototyping, development, media and culture, shipping, etc. Writing about other things is fine too!
There are things that are disallowed here: see Server Rules and Code of Conduct (TL;DR: be a sensible, nice human being).
Good question!
Seems that in year 2017, Quite Many (tm) people got a bit upset with Twitter for various reasons. It can be an unwelcoming, annoying, depressing or flat out dangerous environment for some. After I (Aras Pranckevičius) saw a sentiment of "let's do another twitter-like thing for game developers, without all the twitter bullshit" repeated a few times, I decided to spin up this Mastodon instance.
My own annoyances with Twitter: bots, spam, trolls, ads, twitter-the-company messing around with my timeline. These are all fairly minor (I haven't experienced serious harrassment etc.); it could be much worse for others.
So that's the main point: a smaller, no-{insert bad things} twitter-like community about game development.
Now of course, a "smaller twitter" has downsides too; by definition it is smaller and has less people to interact with, and being game-development specific, has somewhat less topics being talked about. It's a good idea for peace of mind and cultivating your existing interests; it's probably not a good place for getting new interests, expanding your horizons or experiencing wildly different points of view. YMMV!
I'm Aras Pranckevičius; a programmer by trade. Been ages since I worked on actual game production, but I did spend many years working on Unity game engine; you might have heard about it.
I intend to keep this running as long as it seems to be useful. This isn't facebook or twitter; there's no huge live-ops team making the whole thing run smoothly though. The server might get hammered at times; or it might have an hour or two downtime when software upgrades are done. The actual hosting & administration of Mastodon software is done by masto.host people; we'll try to keep operation as smooth as possible. But again, hiccups might occur once in a while. Be patient; also... it's only a social network :)
I'm paying for the server costs myself; that's fine, I'm not looking for any help/crowdfunding/whatever in that area.
Whether you can trust me (and other moderators) to be welcoming and just? I don't know, your call. I'll try my best to be.