Mastodon thoughts of the day, and this one includes a server recommendation if you want to get your feet wet. Bery, please comment whenever convenient. (This is really long, sorry.) -- (edited)
Posted by
mara
Nov 9 '22, 08:37
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First off, don't believe them when they say the server (aka instance) doesn't matter. With Mastodon, you have three different timelines. One is the people you follow (Home), no matter which instance they're on; and another is everyone your instance (Local). Bery is on an instance for PHP programmers, which means his local timeline is people talking about a topic he's interested in. Your local timeline is kind of useless if it's not of interest, it seems to me.
This also means you may not need to follow anyone in your instance. Following puts them in your Home timeline, but they're already in your Local timeline. However, if it's large and you're missing posts you don't want to miss, you do want to follow. Also, of course, if you change servers. Also, it might be courteous to follow them if they follow you.
You can be on as many servers as you want, with the same "first name," but there's no way to merge those timelines. You can merge your followers, though.
Ideally, STers would probably like a movies or pop culture oriented server, or maybe politics, or of course both, but I can't find one that's accepting new members. So I'm on, and am recommending, mastodon.coffee. My handle is [email protected]. That looks like an email address, obvie, and (maybe for that reason?) sometimes you'll see Mastodon handles as @[email protected]. I don't know when or if the initial @ makes a difference.
This is not an ideal server, really, but it's not bad. It's based in Germany, but posts are in English, and it seems well-run and has nice people. But if anybody hears of a general interest/pop culture and politics type instance, do let us know.
Mastodon.coffee is a website, so of course you can get to it with a browser. On that webpage, you see a "create account" button. Creating an account is just that easy. It's choosing a server that's hard! And if you like, you can explore servers here: https://instances.social/ (Hint: when you get to the moderation rules screen, don't make everything forbidden. Ones that have "with tag" can be "don't care.)
Even on mobile, the browser is not a bad way to access it. But there are apps, too, some free. I use Metatext on my iPhone, which is free. Bery, do you have a rec?
Weirdest thing about Mastodon: "content warnings." CWs started as spoiler alerts and trigger warnings, I think, and are evolving into subject headings. Even for innocuous posts, some people prefer seeing a summarizing subject heading type toot in their timeline rather than a bunch of text (particularly since toots are longer than tweets, and yeah, I'm probably gong to call them posts rather than toots because come on.)
If you don't use a CW on a political post, you might get scolded or even blocked. You're also *way* less likely to get retweeted (boosted). Sometimes people just find politics too depressing to contemplate, I guess, and I can kind of relate -- I stopped listening to NPR on my commute when Trump joined the race back in the before times.
Weirdly, nobody seems to feel that way about climate related posts. The whole CW thing is *very* inconsistent, and people on Mastodon can be *very* passionate about it anyway.
It's very easy to put CWs on your post. The character limit on the "warning" is fairly generous, so I try to give a pretty good idea of what's in the main post. Without being distressing. *sigh*
It's also easy to change a setting for *your* timeline that basically ignores CWs -- removing the need to click to get the full toot, which I have done. And so far I've seen nothing traumatizing. I think there's a separate image setting, which helps a lot I'm sure.
I haven't mentioned the third timeline yet, the Federated. This one is a very, very large. I use it to find new follows sometimes, but it's a firehose and it cannot be curated. It's all public posts from users that people in your server follow, and it's another reason that the server you choose matters, I guess.
When you have established your account, you'll want to go into your settings and put in your display name, bio, and avatar. I need to check to see if hashtags are useful in the bio.
Oh, hashtags. Very important on Mastodon, because there's no text search, just hashtag search. Use the generously.
After the profile, go to Appearance in your settings. You might want "slow mode," so new posts don't keep pushing current ones down automatically. Also this is where you can hide sensitive media, and set it to always expand posts with CWs.
That's probably enough for now. Mastodon is more for socially interacting than just getting news for me so far, but eventually it will probably replace Twitter for me. We'll see.
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