Mastodon
With all the current turmoil amid Elon Musk’s recent aquisition of Twitter, a lot of people are looking for a new micro blogging home.
I decided to give Mastodon a go, as I saw it mentioned a lot.
I went to the joinmastodon.org website, browsed through the list of instances there and decided to give mastodon.scot a go.
Mastodon is a distributed, decentralised platform. There are hundreds of different instances (servers), covering interests from all walks of life. You sign up to an instance that you like the sound of and when you log in you have a choice of three different timelines:
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Home Timeline:
This is where you see all the people you follow. It’ll be empty when you first sign up, until you start following some people.
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Local Timeline:
This one is where all the messages that people of the instance you’re on are listed, in chronological order.
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Federated Timeline:
This timeline consists your local instance, as well as of all the people on different instances the people on yours are following. It will be the busiest, no doubt.
When sharing your address for your Mastodon profile, it’s best to use the whole thing. I will usually resemble @person@instance For example, mine is:
@BillySangster@mastodon.scot
I’m finding it quite enjoyable so far, a bit like the early days of Twitter.
A steep learning curve for some, though, but worth sticking with till you get your head around it.
Here are a few helpful guides and tips (Thanks to Garry Knight @garry@mstdn.social):
An unofficial guide to Mastodon
How to Mastodon - a new social media