I really want to get into Mastodon, but I cannot decide which one I would want to join. Is there one that's say best for.. gaming? Or one best for the arts? I tried to use their search but it's hard to tell which one I'd actually want to be part of.
I too couldn't decide, so I started my own private instance recently (it was dead simple with the docker stack), and sometimes I feel a bit isolated and wonder if I should have joined an established instance instead. I suppose that's the burden one takes upon with a private instance: you have to actively go out and find people to follow and interact with. The advantage of course being that you're not bound by any sort of community rules or norms, and all the other advantages of hosting your own services.
In any case my main goal was to get myself to write more, regardless of who's reading it, so to that end it's been successful.
You could always set up a second account to dig more into another instance. I'm currently on octodon.social (largely because mastodon.social was full when I first joined), but I've been thinking of creating a personal instance to play around with things that I don't necessarily want to clutter another local timeline with.
Have a look at https://instances.noct.zone/, a hand-curated list of a number of the more popular instances and their themes.
But really, you can join anywhere, don't think about it too hard. You can always follow anyone from anywhere. I have a very diverse follower/follow list, instance-wise.
Lots of people across the fediverse like gaming. You just need to pick an instance that isn't heavy on censorship so you don't find yourself trapped in a small sandbox. Many Mastodon instances suffer from this problem so you might want to try some of the older GNU Social instances that federate with a wider audience like loadaverage or quitter.se
