Recently a big wave of Twitter users from India joined Mastodon. This page collects some of the posts I made, hoping to do my part in welcoming them to the Fediverse.
For some context: Twitter in India: Why was rival Mastodon trending? It all began with @sanjayuvacha getting suspended from Twitter because he posted the famous picture of August Landmesser.
Twitter in India: Why was rival Mastodon trending?
Wow if you look at the profile of @Deepsealioness you can see the Indian influx as it unfolds. Welcome, welcome! 🥳
If you’re new to Mastodon, write a post and tag it #introduction. Add some more hashtags indicating your interest and post it. Then got to the context menu and pin it to your profile. Click on the hashtags and find other people, new people, welcome them and spread the news. In the beginning, hashtags are an important way of finding people to connect to.
Here’s another Mastodon quick help toot because it took me a while to understand the user interface: if you click on a toot, you will see all the ancestors (the chain that leads to the one you are looking at) and all the descendants (all the replies and their replies in turn). But in order to see the whole conversation, you now need to scroll up to the top and click the first (!) toot of the conversation: you’ll see no new ancestors but ALL the replies.
Image 1 for 2017-01-05 Mermaid
If you want a cool emoji next to your name, just put it into the name field. You can be 💯☣️❤️⛺️🏔🥇🥋☀️🐥🦁 or whatever else you want. You can even be verified. ✅ But don’t put too many emoji in your name because screen readers will read every single one of them and that gets very annoying very fast, I presume. Mastodon also allows every admin of an instance to have custom emoji that can be seen on other instances. It’s pretty cool. Not all the apps support entering them, though. 😅
If you’re on Mastodon with a single persona, talking about some far out topics can feel odd. People solve this by creating accounts on other instances. I have an account for tabletop roleplaying games on the appropriately named instance tabletop.social. There are other special interest instances! Board games, free software, LGBTQI, and many more. Most Mastodon clients make it pretty easy to switch between instances. Thus, the tradition of alts continues on the Fediverse. See you elsewhere. 🐣
Mastodon Groups have been implemented by third parties using auto-boosting accounts. Here is one example: search for `@india@gup.pe` (you must type their username into the search box: at India at gup.pe!) and follow them. The gulp.pe server creates the account when you search for it. If you mention it, it will boost your message, and thus everybody else following them will get their message.
If you are interested in a much longer blog post, see 2019-09-26 Groups on Mastodon.
I guess now that I created the India account in gup.pe people no longer need to search for it, they can just follow the link? Even better!
Has it been well received? I don’t know. All I can say is that I haven’t seen much use of it. But it works for everybody, irrespective of clients, using standard activities like following and boosting. 😀
I know is that the Russian speaking community has a bot that does that for them and it seems very active: @rf.
An Increasingly Less-Brief Guide to Mastodon
#Mastodon #Social Media #India
---
@El_@kind.social wrote on 2024-01-24:
I moved here from Reddit rather than the birdsite, so my experiences may not be quite what you're looking for, but I started out with an introduction and hashtags.
I followed a few hashtags, and then followed some of the Fedifolk using those regularly.
Then, I started visiting the feeds of boosted Fedifolk.
It's taken a wee while to get a feed that I love browsing, but I don't mind that. I love this self-curation thing.
Hope this helps!
