Maybe youâve heard of the newish social network Mastodon, or maybe you havenât, but between Facebookâs repeat mishandling of data and Twitterâs general toxicity, maybe youâre looking for a new way to keep in touch with your friends and professional networks! Here's a quick guide on how to get started.
What is Mastodon?
Mastodon is a social network similar to Twitter in format, where users post statuses that can be seen in a stream, and can follow each othersâ updates. The default layout on the web is similar to Tweetdeck, in fact! The main difference is that Mastodon is a distributed system broken into instances that anyone can host.
Mastodon also has some nice extra features; posts can go up to 500 characters by default, rather than Twitterâs 280 (and some instances set their limit even higher). You can also control the privacy of specific tweets (only to who youâre following, or only to specific users) and set content warnings for your posts. Some instances also have even stricter codes of conduct and limitations on what content is allowed, if you donât want to deal with spam or adult content.
Mastodon isnât so different from other parts of the internet, but it has its own variations on a lot of social media terms:
- Toots = tweets, statuses
- Boost = retweet
- Fediverse = a collection of servers used for web publishing that work by an agreed-upon standard. Mastodon is a Fediverse.
- Favorite = like
- Locked account = private account
Instances, and Picking Yours
The original Mastodon instance is mastodon.social, but you can search the whole list of instances at instances.social or on the Mastodon informational website. Instances are sometimes themed and have a particular culture to them; there are some targeted at artists, some for tech, some that are for posting selfies or birds only, some just for running mastodon bots.
Youâll probably be fine on a general instance such as mastodon.cloud if you donât have a particular preference, since you can follow anyone on any Mastodon instance. Your instance matters for two things: your full username/URL (so if you want to be @yourname@webdev.network, sign up on webdev.network), and who shows up in whatâs called the âLocal Timeline,â which is a stream of all posts on that instance. The âFederated Timelineâ shows all posts across all instances, apart from any that your instance has blocked.
Before you sign up on any one instance, consider clicking around to look at what instances exist, whether theyâre open for new signups (some instances have a user cap or are invite-only) and if you like their vibe and the content available in their public timeline! You donât need to make friends with everyone in your instance, but itâs good to get a feel for the culture. Itâs also good to look at their stats for how many users they have and how many statuses have been posted on that instance; depending on how you want to use Mastodon, you may prefer a smaller, quieter instance, or a larger and more talkative one.
Signing Up and Setting Up Your Account
Once youâve picked an instance, sign up! If an instance is open for signups, youâll usually find it in the left-hand sidebar on the front page.
Logged in, youâll see a column for typing statuses, one for your timeline, one for your notifications, and one where you can open your local or federated timelines, or view your direct messages, favorites or lists.
Above the status box, youâll see a search bar, and then above that a gear icon, which is where you can manage your account settings.
Edit Profile contains some controls for the look of your profile; you can edit your display name and bio, as well as add a profile image and header just like on Twitter. You can also choose to lock your account here, which will require followers to be approved by you, which is useful if you plan to make tweets private to followers. You can also enter up to 4 items of custom metadata for your profile, which you can use to display things like your website or pronouns.
Preferences contains a number of settings for how you read and write on Mastodon, including selecting what language youâd like for the interface, and what languages to show in your timelines. This can be helpful for filtering out content you canât read from the Local and Federated Timelines. Preferences also contains settings for hiding your posts from the Local/Federated timelines if you donât want to be findable that way, and opt out of search engine indexing. You can also control what content to hide or display by default from here.
A lot of the other settings sections are pretty straightforward, though worth exploring since they give you some other useful privacy controls. Authorized followers in particular is useful if youâre a locked account; this is where you can set your list of who can see your posts.
Youâll also want to look into Filters, which is under Settings; it allows you to filter out certain keyword content from any or all of your timelines, which is great if thereâs a topic in the news youâd prefer not to see or if all your friends are really into a TV show youâre not into.
Writing a Toot
Itâs time to write your first toot if you havenât already! You have up to 500 characters, unless your instance allows more. If youâd like to add images, click the icon of a camera. The globe icon allows you to adjust the privacy of your status; you can make any individual toot unlisted from public timelines, or post to your followers only. You can also just send a toot to specific users, like a direct message on Twitter.
The other tool you have in writing toots on Mastodon is content warnings; you can manage them under the âCWâ icon. If your toot contains sensitive content or a common phobia, you can label why youâre hiding your content with a warning, and then put the actual content underneath. Some Mastodon users also use this to tell jokesâthey write the setup in the âwarningâ field and the punchline in the status box.
Then hit the Toot! button! Thatâs it, youâre live on Mastodon!
Finding People to Follow
If youâre looking to see who you already know thatâs on Mastodon, you can use Mastodon Bridge, which lets users connect their Twitter and Mastodon accounts so their followers on either platform can find their account on the other. You can also opt to add your information to the database so that people can look you up on Mastodon as well!
Apart from already knowing people, the primary way to find people to follow is looking at your Local and Federated timelines to see what people are posting and following folks who look interesting. Many people will also add hashtags of things they like to post about to their profile to make them easy to search for, if youâre looking for people into the same topics!
Crossposting To and From Twitter
If you want to still post content for your followers on Twitter but start ramping up your Mastodon presence, you can log in with both your Twitter and Mastodon accounts on the Twitter-Mastodon Crossposter, which will automatically crosspost in either direction, with the option to include retweets/boosts, replies, mentions, etc.
Multiple Accounts?
As mentioned above, you can follow anyone on any mastodon instance from one account, so if youâd like to follow someone on birb.site when youâre on witches.live, thereâs no need to create a birb.site account. You can also create curated lists of users, just like on Twitter, if you want to see a feed of just people you follow for tabletop gaming, or music, or people you know IRL. However, there are definitely reasons you might want to create more than one account:
- Maintaining an account for a particular type of professional content (art, web development, etc) without getting your personal talk mixed in there
- Participating in an instance for posting a specific kind of content (bird pictures, selfies, etc)
- Managing an account for an organization, meetup group, or company
- Creating bots for Mastodon
For most of those cases, Iâd suggest setting up accounts on different Mastodon instances; there isnât a whole lot of support for being logged into two accounts on one Mastodon instance like Tweetdeck provides for Twitter, but you can keep two instances open in two separate tabs, and some mobile Mastodon clients allow you to be logged into multiple instances.
If you want to switch to using a different account (even one on a different instance!), you can find a setting to redirect your account under Edit Profile in your settings.
Running Your Own Mastodon Instance
You might consider running your own Mastodon instance if you want really fine control over some instance-wide settings, if you want to fill a niche that isnât already present, or if you want to have an instance thatâs curated to a specific group of people, such as family or friends.
An easy way to run your own is to use masto.host, which will manage a Mastodon instance for you. You can also run one off of your own server, if you have one and want to control your hosting. The resources Mastodon requires generally are related to how many users the instance has, which is why many instances have user caps or are invite-only. If youâre interested, you can find more info about running your own instance here.
Follow me on Mastodon!
My ulterior motive in writing this is to get more folks on Mastodon so I can hang out with them! You can find me at carly@kitty.town.
Top comments (15)
In general I think the level of vitriol and general stressful content is a bit lower, compared to Twitter; I think it helps a lot that people can set content warnings on posts, so if you know a lot of your followers are getting hackles up over an issue, you can allow them to choose whether to engage. I think it probably varies by instanceâI imagine the local timeline is a lot spicier on some of the more politics-oriented instancesâbut I think it's a lot easier to mediate exposure. A lot of instances also enforce much stricter codes of conduct than Twitter.
As far as privacy for who you follow, it's possible to hide your following list, yeah. A lot of blocking seems to be done on an instance-wide scale, since some instances allow illegal content or certain types of behavior while others specifically don't. If you're on a pretty general instance like mastodon.cloud, though, you're unlikely to get blocked by anyone just based on that.
I have seen GNU Social come and go several times. I doubt that coating it as "Mastodon" will finally kill off Twitter...
I think it has some legs this time. I've checked out Mastodon a few times, but recently I'm finding myself spending more time on Mastodon than Twitter.
It's really nice to be able to read the Local and Global timelines, just like in the early days of Twitter. Having a firehose of people, personalities and topics is nice.
Plus Mastodon is developer friendly, unlike bird site.
I wrote two Twitter bots. I'm fine.
hope springs eternal, friend.
Thank you for this comprehensive guide! I really <3 Mastodon, I like that thereâs an instance for everyone, but I can still follow friends on other instances.
It appears that this has a lot more traction than in the past. However, I haven't used either of those so maybe you're right.
I have been evaluating all of the "better Twitters" and the only ones that stick are the ones with people who are on Twitter anyway.
LOL. I didn't even know that was a thing until I saw Thomas Fuchs abandon twitter for Mastodon. How do you even pronounce it? Mas-to-don? Masto-don? It's a hideous name, lol.
This response to the name makes me want to ask you so many questions! Are you a US native? I've always taken it for granted that everyone learns about mastodons.
No, I'm not a natural born US native. I never thought about looking up the meaning of mastodon, but now that you've mentioned it, I'm surprised that I didn't know about it. Perhaps I was sleeping in class đ. Actually, I don't recall studying about it. I know about Woolly mammoths though.
Fediverse reminds me of Usenet, but before I elaborate on that aspect, thanks @carlymho for the introduction to the fediverse! This post is worth to rediscover now, as Mastodon and other fediverse servers like chaos.social get more new users annoyed of mainstream (anti)social networks with their biased algorithms and dude-ish "chief twats".
Everyone, please remember that the decentralized independent federation is mostly run by non-profit volunteers, which is the whole point about being noncommercial, so the next step after signing up and completing your profile is to find out how to donate some money (often easy to do via Patreon) to keep your fediverse provider running! For the popular Mastodon server, see joinmastodon.org/sponsors.
There has been renewed discussion about the difference between federated and centralized social networks and their culture and values.
Unlike Twitter and Instagram, the fediverse reminds me a bit of Usenet, a decentralized network of knowledge and discussion that has been here long before the world-wide-web brought us forums and so-called social networks with sparkling multi-media online content and addictive algorithms. Although Usenet was mainly text-based, people also managed to exchange images and other files as well. Usenet was not only decentralized in terms of ownership and responsibility, but it was more resilient against anyone taking control, taking it offline, or introducing a paywall to use it.
The main difference between Usenet and forums on one hand, and modern social networks on the other: in social networks, you follow and interact with people, and topics are an optional secondary aspect added using hashtags.
The "Web3" movement, often dismissed as a fad by gamer kids trying to get rich quick, has expressed some reasonable criticism against (the current mainstream) "Web 2.0" being centralized and controlled by an oligopoly of commercial corporations trying to manipulate its users.
While I don't agree with the technology-obsessed solutions proposed by Web3 thought leaders, trying to add even more technology, I prefer that we remember the times before the world-wide web and revive some of the ideas that were vital to the internet from the beginning, like decentralization, resilience and robustness.
Mastodon and the rest of the fediverse are a chance to rethink the way we want to use technology and communication. Let's take back control and conceive another take on a future web that puts people before technology.
Something tells me you like cats. I think you will do well on this internet thing.
As someone who's never Twittered, what does Mastodon have to offer?
Everything seems to say it's Twitter but better, but that doesn't tell me why I should go from no Twitter to a Mastodon.
If you're not necessarily into twitter's posting format, you might not find it super useful, but I think it's a solid way to provide status updates to friends and people interested in your work, in the same way as Twitter.
The other thing about Mastodon is that instances are often organized around themes, which is a good way to have connections right off the bat with people who have similar interests, unlike Twitter. Especially on active instances with a smaller or medium-sized population, there's a nice sense of community and people will follow you back pretty enthusiastically, so it feels a little bit more friendly.