What I’ve learned about Mastodon
When Twitter launched in 2006 I was heavy into Open Source content management systems and didn’t pay much attention to it.
Why would I post what I had for breakfast or take pictures of my morning coffee spot, who would care. It wasn’t until 2007 that I signed up and posted my first tweet.
Woohoo how exciting 😀 I think we all posted tweets like that back then. Now 15 years later I realized that twitter became part of many aspects of my day-to-day work and a huge time suck when I wasn’t at work. I can admit I spent too much time doom scrolling and yet I also found an amazing amount of resources for my industry and appreciate the bit of community I did find.
When Twitter was purchased recently and I realized it was not the best place for me anymore I started to think about what I needed from my social media/network and online community. I tried Tribel (data harvester?), I tried counter.social (it didn’t feel right), and then I signed up for Mastodon. That was last Thursday. My biggest worry – losing my search community – not being able to keep up-to-date professionally was alleviated this weekend. One of the biggest thing that I found was just how helpful everyone has been with those trying to move over. Articles written, tips shared – as we learned how to do things on Mastodon.
So far I’m really enjoying this new community and I’m still learning along with everyone else. I’ll leave comments open on this post if you have something you learned you think is important for new people on Mastodon.
So for those thinking about it.. here is what I learned:
Note: This is not meant to replace all the great guides online – I’ll link below to the ones I’ve found useful as I’ve navigated this network.
- Mastodon is not the same as Twitter – it’s not – Twitter is one large website with (right now) one person making decisions for all those on the site where Mastodon is federated – multiple servers you can pick from and join. Each server has it’s own rules – oftentimes agreed upon by people who join that server. Don’t like the rules on one server – Mastodon has made it relatively easy to move all your followers etc to a different server. . With Mastodon you can find a server of like minded individuals in your industry (law, journalism, art, teachers, medical, etc) I recommend you find a server you like and then you can connect to friends and family on other servers.
- Toots & Boosts – A toot is equal to a tweet – and boosts are retweet
- Finding People – Admittedly it can be hard to figure out how to follow or how to find people. There are a lot of industry leaders creating “follow” lists or find someone you respect in your industry on mastodon then click on their “following” and you can start following there.
- Retweets – Mastodon doesn’t do “quote retweets” like we are used to (they would be called quote retoots) where you could “quote retweet” on twitter that is not available on Mastodon and it’s designed that way. It helps with harassment issues as you have to reply to the actual status.
- Lists – On Mastodon lists are private (not shareable) but they are really useful for curating your favorite content creators whether its someone who is a thought leader in your industry or people who post a lot of cat pics.
- Content Moderation – Something we are not really used to but considered being polite on Mastodon is using the CM button to hide your content if it’s sensitive (consider politics, triggering posts) You can still post them but consider the potential reader. Also for many who have been here before the twitter migration they may not boost your post if your content is not behind CM when it should be
- Please add descriptions to your images – this helps those using screen readers and is just a polite thing to do.
- Support the software and your server admin – To help keep the Mastodon software humming along and adding more features https://www.patreon.com/mastodon – when you join a server look for either a pinned post where the server admin takes donations so they can increase hardware and any time needed to administrate the server.
Where to start:
This site has a great comprehensive guide for finding a server – finding others etc.
https://fedi.tips – constantly updated and answers just about everything!
Mastodon has been around for a long time – there are lots of great humans ready to help. If we can all be polite/considerate and respect the community we just invaded I think we can create an environment we can all truly enjoy. I am looking forward to the reduction in toxicity and doom scrolling.
See ya there @snowwrite@mastodon.social 😀
