If you’re fleeing the sinking ship of Twitter for Mastodon’s potential life raft — or wondering if you should — here’s what you need to know.
Welcome to Fediverse
The first thing that interests you is that Mastodon is what is known as a “federated” network, a collection of thousands of social networks running on servers around the world connected by shared Mastodon technology, on a platform known as ” Fediverse ». You join a specific server, which is run by whoever created it, usually volunteers who do it out of pocket or receive donations through Patreon. They will have their own rules and policies about, for example, who can join and how tightly the chat will be moderated. You can even start your own server if you want to set the rules yourself. Otherwise, there is a list of servers that focus on specific locations or topics of interest. The servers on this list have all signed up to the “Mastodon Pact,” which pledges “active moderation against racism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia.” However, whichever Mastodon server you join, you can follow users on a different one without issue. Oh, and since this is a volunteer-run system, there are no paid ads in your feed.
Usernames are different
Once you’ve chosen a username and set up your account with a header image and profile picture, you’re good to go. Unlike Twitter, your username will be @[username]@[the Mastodon instance you signed up to]. So for example you could be @[email protected] Think of it like an email address – the first part is the ID you’ve chosen, the second part is the organization that looks after your inbox. There are apps on iOS and Android that allow you to log into your Mastodon accounts.
Finding Twitter users is a chore
If you want to find all the people you follow on Twitter in Mastodon, unfortunately there is no easy way to do this. Alex Hern’s weekly dive into how technology is shaping our lives Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain information about charities, online advertising and content sponsored by external parties. For more information, see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and Google’s Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. You could start searching for those you know or go back to Twitter and see if they’ve announced their move. Services like Twitodon let you connect to your Twitter and Mastodon accounts and scan to find people you follow. But it will only be able to find those users who have also used Twitodon. Once you’ve followed a few people you’ve found from Twitter, you can go through their lists to find other people you might know.
The post is similar but different
For starters, you may need to get used to calling your posts “toots” rather than “tweets.” On the plus side, you’ll have almost double the number of characters (500) to write a post and additional features like clickable spoiler warnings for text and images. You’ll have more control over who can see your post, from it being discoverable on the server, to only those you mention in the post – similar to a DM. Hashtags work similarly to Twitter for trending topics, and you can share someone else’s post with your followers by amplifying it – which works the same as retweeting. But there is no such thing as a “quote offer”.
Verification is easy – and free
There has been a lot of drama on Twitter about Musk’s move to require people to pay for verification while at the same time not actually verifying that they are who they say they are. Mastodon has a verification system that is available to everyone with its own website. If you link to a website that you control on your profile, then it can identify you as the owner of that website, which will give followers some reason to trust that you are who you claim to be.
