One of those new social networks, but actually cool
Mastodon! It’s decentralised and has lots of queers and people are actually using it. Let me try to make a masterpost because I’m excited.
Decentralised means there’s not one site, like tumblr.com, where everyone is, but that people are on loads of different servers (”instances”, at the moment over 2000 of them) that are all running the same software and communicating with each other, so that you can have your account on any of them and interact with people who are on different ones.
It has content warnings (in the form of spoilers/readmores)
You can filter/mute words or phrases
It is open source and many of the people who use it actually help make it, and if you can’t do that by coding, you can still tell others about a thing that would be cool to have, and sometimes that is complicated, but sometimes it leads to really cool features
You can choose the instance you sign up on by how much you like its admin, for example… or by how good the anti harassment policy is.
Everyone uses cringy/awesome URLs. I’m literally on cybre.space and other instances that exist are catgirl.science and toot.cat and anticapitalist.party, how cool is that, finally the aesthetics to fit this cyberpunk dystopia that we live in
Posts are called toots because mastodons are like mammoths and elephants make “toot”
Most (or hopefully all) instances don’t track us and won’t sell our data and don’t display ads, like commercial social media sites do
No full text search, to prevent terfs from harassing everyone who writes about terfs, and authors from harassing everyone who criticizes their work, etc etc well you know what Tumblr and birbsite are like. (You can search for hashtags, accounts, and among toots that you have already interacted with or that are your own.)
There is a setting to autopause gifs
What’s not cool (have to be honest, no place is perfect)
The current default theme is not very accessible (low contrast, white text on dark background, not great at high zoom) – there are ways to deal with this, scroll down to “Random Stuff” for possible fixes. But still, could be better.
There are instances in the fediverse (that means: all Mastodon, and also non-Mastodon-but-using-something-similar, instances combined) that allow or even encourage their users to harass others, like on Twitter – you are dependent on your own instance admin to block those instances from connecting with yours. (You can, however, block users, and block instances from your own account, and remove whole instances from your followers.)
Sometimes, things don’t work as one would expect (but usually people are happy to help).
So, that was the honest-ish advertisement, now for resources.
User Guide: Explains how Mastodon works, how to use it, important terms. Pay attention to the privacy settings and to the way federation works, those might not be very intuitive. See also the FAQ
Toot How-To : Intro to Mastodon
Mastodon 101: A Queer-Friendly Social Network You’re Gonna Like a Lot on Autostraddle
Resources for Mastodon newbies (I love this one, it has a few links and some info about things that you might find weird when joining Mastodon)
So, you are considering signing up, but have no idea which instance to choose?
I’d recommend browsing through http://instances.noct.zone/ and picking whichever sounds nicest to you.
Or if you prefer a thing that recommends an instance based on your answers to a few questions: instances.social
So here are my subjective recommendations (keep in mind, I only know a small part of all the instances in existence):
monsterpit.net I only just discovered this one, but they look great
computerfairi.es is small and queer and has a lot of tech talk. It uses a theme with purple background
elekk.xyz gaming-focused & explicitly feminist
queer.party I have a side account there and it’s nice
tootplanet.space I have another side account there and it’s also great
wandering.shop I don’t know this one well, but it seems to be the good kind of geeky
mastodon.art for, well, art
toot.cat seems super nice
Code of conduct and administration. You’ll want to pick an instance that aligns with your principles and the way you want to use your account, and that you trust to deal with any issues appropriately. Relevant info is on [instance url]/about/more.
Size. Instances have a local timeline, where you see the public toots of everyone on this instance. on a small instance, it can help build community. on the flagship mastodon.social, with more than 100 000 users, it is too fast to even follow.
Community. Use this tool to see the last few public toots from that instance and decide if it’s a place you’d like to be at.
Looks. Is the theme readable for you & do you like it? Unfortunately, there is no built-in way to check this yet, but screenshots are being collected here.
On Mastodon, because there are loads of different places that are connected, usernames look more like email addresses because they always include your instance as well:
One of my accounts is @[email protected] (but I’m mostly at @[email protected] right now, feel free to follow me there). maunzikation alone would be confusing – in fact, I’m also @[email protected], but these are all different accounts that have little to do with each other (except that I made them – but you can’t tell that from the name, it could be made by someone else). So if you want to mention someone who’s on a different instance, you have to include their instance for it to work. Just like you’d include “@gmail.com” or “@riseup.net” when emailing someone.
You have an account, you feel somewhat at home, and you want to make stuff better? Or there is some accessibility improvement that you need before you sign up?
There is the github thingie https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon
If you want to report a problem or suggest new features, what you want to do is go here specifically.
There is a search bar. Use it to see if anyone has already posted about that thing. If yes, you can add your info or comments there. If not, click “New Issue” and make your own post.
(If yes, but it’s been months since the last comment, maybe also open a new issue, it might not be great form, but at least people will notice.)
If you want more of an open discussion, or need help in figuring out what you want or need, post to this forum.
Financially support your instance’s Patreon, if it has one, or your instance admin personally.
Give feedback/money/… to any Mastodon apps you use! Most of them are also free and open source, just like Mastodon itself, and very happy about any contribution.
Keep an eye on the federated timeline and try to help people who are having problems figuring out how stuff works.
Look at #introductions and #introduction occasionally and boost some of the toots, to spread the word about newcomers that people might want to follow.
Solutions to accessibility issues (also interesting if you simply don’t like the way it looks)
How to automatically post your mastodon posts on twitter with IFTTT (would also work with tumblr)
Mastodon-Twitter-Bridge: Sign in with both so your twitter followers can find you on mastodon
On the history of mastodon and some of the things that I implied with “it’s complicated” re people making the software they use
I didn’t want to post it as an actual recommendation, but there is an instance called ephemeral.glitch.social that deletes toots at some time that is determined my the moon phases, and promises to be unstable with lots of feature testing, and people there seem to be nice.
Some people use it just for fun, some for self-deleting private accounts. Or you could use Forget on any instance for the latter (also works for Twitter btw).
And joinmastodon.org is like a non-instance-specific page about mastodon, not very detailed, but has a few useful links. If you want to link to Mastodon as a whole, link joinmastodon.
full list: https://github.com/tootsuite/documentation/blob/master/Using-Mastodon/Apps.md
