If you've heard the word mastodon since Elon Musk took over in late October it is because the extinct mammal is also the name of a relatively small and little known social network that is gaining popularity very fast.
Mastodon and the Fediverse
The Fediverse or just Fedi is a collection of independent servers that talk to each other seamlessly. This means that the millions of users on these servers can interact with each other as if they were on a single social network.
The most popular type of Fedi server is called Mastodon or just Masto and works like a calmer, more friendly version of Twitter.
There are many kinds of Fediverse servers, often with a specific purpose such as photo sharing, video sharing, livestreaming, book clubs etc.
Although the various types of servers work very differently, they talk to each other with a common technical standard called ActivityPub, someone on Mastodon (a Twitter-like service) can subscribe to an account on PeerTube (a YouTube-like service), and the PeerTube videos will appear in the Mastodon user’s timeline. They can interact with the videos entirely within Mastodon, and their interactions will also appear next to the video on PeerTube, because the servers communicate and allow users to interact.
Looks like the same, but is different
Many of the mastodon features and layout (particularly in their mobile apps) will look familiar to current Twitter users, although with a slightly different word here and there. You can follow other people, create short posts (limit of 500 characters), send images and videos, “retweet” posts from other users, and so on.
Finding people
For me, one of the most complicated aspects of joining mastodon was finding people I know and discover people I wanted to follow. But this is because there are no suggestions generated by algorithms of those who you follow, there is no scan of your contacts in search of people you know and follow on other social networks who are already using mastodon.
Similar to Twitter, you can use hashtags on mastodon to look for topics and people the #twittermigration is currently very popular for newcomers.
Once you have settled on a server and you have people to follow, you will want to start reading the posts of others and posting yourself. You will quickly notice many differences from Twitter. For example, users updates are chronologically classified instead of algorithically.
You also can not “quote retweet” a post, the closest you can get is to copy and paste the URL to the original post on your own posting.
These differences are not bad, and some of them can be really good. This can make posting on mastodon look a little less reactive than on Twitter, which is great for anyone who gets annoyed with other people posts. And many of the people who are experiencing mastodon look ready for a change.
Learn more
If you want to join mastodon and don't know how to create an account, or have already created one but still lost in the interface visit FediTips for a complete beginners guide and a FAQ.
Top comments (1)
Wanted to add, another way of finding people to follow is by using the community trunk that adds people to certain hashtag communities for easier following.
communitywiki.org/trunk/