2019-08-29 How to Mastodon again

I wrote 2017-11-16 How to Mastodon. These days I’m not so sure it’s still good. Instead, I see Joyeuse Noëlle’s An Increasingly Less-Brief Guide to Mastodon getting recommended a lot.

2017-11-16 How to Mastodon

An Increasingly Less-Brief Guide to Mastodon

First, before doing anything, set a picture on your profile and write at least one, preferably four posts that tell us something about yourself, about what to expect. The reason being that if you follow somebody, they are notified and might look at your profile in turn – and maybe they will follow you back. But I’m not following a faceless and silent avatar. It’s too creepy.

Let me think of the things that seem non-obvious to me.

• search is often limited to hashtags in public posts on your server only!
• thus, use hashtags every now and then so other people can find your posts
• you can also search for accounts from other servers: search for *kensanata* to find my various accounts and click on the “person plus” icon in order to follow me
• sometimes clicking on an account from another server shows you that they have written posts but don’t show any of the posts: that’s because the posts haven’t been downloaded to *your* server, yet – if you follow them, their posts will get downloaded, eventually
• clicking on the avatar of a profile takes you to their profile on *their* server: now you can see their public posts but since you are on their server, you need to log in again before interacting (i.e. before favoring or boosting posts, or before following accounts)
• *Home* is for the posts of people you follow
• *Notifications* is for posts that mention you or people favoring (liking) or boosting (sharing) your posts
• *Local* is for posts from people on the same server as you
• *Federated* is for posts on the same server as you, even if written by people not on your server: mostly posts from people somebody on your server is already following
• clicking on a post shows you all it’s ancestors (no branches) and all its descendants (including all the branches); check out this image: what I’m trying to say is that you will see all the posts in blue

Image 1 for 2017-01-05 Mermaid

• if you want to see *all* the replies, scroll to the top and click the original post: you are once again shown all it’s ancestors (none, you’re at the top) and all its descendants (all the replies)

Once you created an account, you can log into that account using different applications. These can be apps on your phone, or they can be *other websites*. Here are two:

Pinafore

Brutaldon

These might offer a more pleasing experience, depending on your needs. I like Mastodon as it is.

I was a TweetDeck user. If you like the multi-column layout, check “Enable advanced web interface” in your settings. It used to be the default.

​#Mastodon ​#Social Media

Comments

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This is what I have found by myself.

A lot of these points make “living” on a smaller server a bit lonely, since you have less people to “directly” follow, you see less people, you can see less content based on hashtag search.

If that is what you are looking for, then it is an advantage, of course 😀

– Peter Kotrčka 2019-08-30 04:29 UTC

Peter Kotrčka

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Yeah, the reason I picked Octodon Social at first was because it was big and I didn’t want an instance focused on white men programming.

But Tabletop Social is small and make some think the RPG scene is small. But who knows.

– Alex Schroeder 2019-08-30 09:48 UTC

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