Mastodon: Everything You Need to Know

Interest in the open source social media platform known as Mastodon has spiked again as users look for an alternative to Twitter, should Elon Musk’s takeover spell the end of that website as we know it.

If you’re fleeing the sinking ship of Twitter for the potential life raft of Mastodon – or wondering whether to – here’s what you need to know.

Welcome to the Fediverse

The first thing to get your head around is that Mastodon is what’s known as a “federated” network, a collection of thousands of social networks run on servers across the world that are linked by the common Mastodon technology, on a platform known as the “Fediverse”.

You sign up for a specific server, which is run by whoever set it up, usually volunteers doing it out of their own pocket or taking donations through Patreon. They’ll have their own rules and policies on, for example, who can join and how strictly the conversation will be moderated.

You can even start your own server if you want to set the rules yourself. Otherwise, there’s a list of servers which focus on specific locations or topics of interest. The servers on that list have all signed up to the “Mastodon covenant” which promises “active moderation against racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia”.

Whichever Mastodon server(s) you sign up for, however, you can follow users on a different one with no problem.

Oh, and as this is a volunteer-run system, there are no paid-for ads in your feed. (...)

Posting is similar but different

For a start, you may have to get used to your posts being called “toots” rather than “tweets”.

On the plus side, you’ll have almost twice as many characters (500) to write a post, and additional features such as click spoiler warnings for text and images.

You will have more control over who can see your post, from being discoverable across the server, down to only those who you mention in the post – similar to a DM.

Hashtags work similar to Twitter for trending topics, and you can share someone else’s post with your followers by boosting it – which works the same as retweeting. But there’s no such thing as “quote tooting”.

by Josh Taylor, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Davide Bonaldo/SOPA Images/REX/Shutterstock

[ed. "Tweets" were bad enough, but "toots"? Haha. Probably an accurate reflection of most opinions though.]