Mastodon Social Media Network

Mastodon is an alternative Social Media network hosted by people all over the world instead of by one corporation. It belongs to nobody – but us. It works similar to twitter and has no advertisement. Nobody is getting rich, so algorithms, if any, are not designed to maximise profit, but to maximise your experience.

People sign up using different servers – just like people do for their personal e-mail addresses. The hardest part is choosing the server you want to sign up with, but we’ll get to that later. Here is how it works! Since there is no evil algorhythm, you have three “feeds”:

Your “Feed” or “Timeline”

This is simply every post from people you have followed, in chronological order, and here you can follow anyone from any server.

The “Local Timeline”

This will be, in chronological order, everything that people posted who share your server.

That means: if you’re hosting your own server, you could specify a main theme of your server, for example you may want that people who are using your server mostly to speak about ‘activism’ or who live in your city, such as to expect that they should post content relevant to a certain cluster of people.

That’s why communities who are trying to get away from facebook would do well hosting their own local server: their local timeline will be filled with stuff that they are more likely to be interested it. On facebook, an algorithm based on likes, clicks etc. will choose for you what you are more likely to “like” (from all people you like), and that, for their fb’s benefit. On mastodon, you are in charge of your network of interest.

In your timeline (see 1), you will still be able to see posts by people from other servers – from other areas of interest.

The “Federated Timeline”

This is literally alllll posts from alll people who are connected in the “federation”. You see every single post, which is therefore only useful if you are bored to death, otherwise rather too much. So why do this feature? As a host of a server you can block other servers to be connected (“federated”) with your server. So if you are running a server with a very niche topic, this could be useful – then their “federated timeline” is more useful to them. This means a secret network of servers can work outside of the main big network.

Hashtags

And lastly, you can search for people and hashtags, so here, what one would have wanted to work on instagram with hashtags actually works because there is no interfering algorithm. The results are sorted chronologically, and what is most recent is on the top.

Basic Interaction Features

You can follow and be followed, you can ‘favourite’ posts (“like”), “boost” posts by sharing them in your profile (which makes them appear on the top of the local timeline again), you can “bookmark”, which privately stores the post in your bookmarks, and you can reply to a post (comment). Discussions are kept within one post/topic, like on facebook, twitter or instagram. You can see followed and followers of other people to check what else is going on.

Tips to Get Started

The most difficult part when trying to get started was choosing a server:

remember that no matter where you are hosted, you can follow people from any server and see them in your timeline
but each server has their rules. Some are more open, some have an instant sign-up feature, for some you have to get an invitation, some want people from a special area of interest or language or phyiscal area. So click through and read a litlte. If you are overwhelmed:
… you might have a friend who already uses mastodon, ask to send you an invitation.
most servers have the typical rules (no bullying, no racism etc. etc.) – but some don’t only describe their rules but also how they handle for example back-ups.

Also cool: you can generate invitation links to send to your friends, with the option to make them automatically follow you.