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mastodon-beginners.md

Mastodon for people who are new to social media

In this blog post, I try to explain Mastodon to people who are not familiar with social media and/or beginner computer users. I try to be as jargon-free as I can.

Structure of this blog post:

  • Reading section 1 and 2 takes a bit of effort: They explain important background knowledge for Mastodon. But, in my opinion, the effort is worth it because you’ll find it much easier to use Mastodon. Not having this knowledge can prevent even otherwise advanced computer users from enjoying Mastodon.

  • Section 3 is brief and mentions first steps for actually getting started with Mastodon.

Table of contents:

1. What is Mastodon?

One challenge with Mastodon is that it’s slightly more complicated than other social networks such as Facebook, Instagram or X/Twitter. But, if you are willing to learn a few basics and are a little patient (with yourself and with Mastodon), you’ll get used to it quickly. Many others have before you – even people who say about themselves that they are “not good with computers”.

Mastodon combines three aspects:

  • Like email, it enables you to stay in contact with other people.
  • It lets you publish news.
  • It lets you consume news.

1.1. Mastodon is like email

One one hand, Mastodon works like email:

  • There are many email services out there and each service has its own server – e.g.:

    • Google has gmail.com
    • Apple has icloud.com
    • Microsoft has outlook.com

  • Which email server you use does not affect who you can communicate with: Even if you have an icloud.com address, you can send an email to a gmail.com address.

  • To use Mastodon, you have to pick a server, go to its website and create an account there. The biggest Mastodon server is mastodon.social but there are many other servers out there – they are listed at the official mastodon server directory.

  • To refer to a Mastodon user robin on a server mastodon.example, you write @[email protected]. That looks very much like an email address.

  • No matter on which Mastodon server you are, you can communicate with all users on all servers – you only have to know their addresses.

1.2. Mastodon lets you publish news

You can publish news:

  • You can write posts: short news items with up to 500 characters of text. To the text, you can attach images, videos, etc. – if you want to.
  • Who can read your posts? In principle, everyone. There are ways to make posts less public, but if you value privacy and only want a limited group of people to see what you are writing, other services may be better suited to your needs.

1.3. Mastodon lets you consume news – by “following” other Mastodon accounts

You can consume news:

  • You can subscribe to Mastodon accounts. That is called following.
  • You have a so-called “Home feed” (a feed is a sequence of posts) that shows your posts and the posts of all the accounts you follow.
  • If you see someone else’s post and would like your followers to see it, you can boost it (re-publish it to your followers, share it with your followers).

1.4. Mastodon is decentralized: What does that mean? What are the benefits?

  • Facebook is centralized: A single company provides and controls this service.

  • Email is decentralized: Many companies provide email services. Roughly, a protocol is a language that is used by servers to communicate with each other. The protocol for email is standardized and ensures that all email services are compatible with each other.

  • Mastodon is decentralized: There are many Mastodon servers. They all use a standard protocol that is called ActivityPub.

The key benefit of decentralization is that it avoids lock-in: You can move to a different server and take your followers and people you follow with you (but not your posts, yet). Why would you want to do that?

  • You disagree with the people who run the server.
  • You server has to shut down - e.g. due to financial or legal reasons.
  • The server bans you.

How about other social networks? X/Twitter, Facebook and Instagram are completely centralized. Bluesky has decentralized parts but mostly locks you into their “server”, i.e. their Relay/AppView/Labeler services (more information).

1.5. What is the Fediverse?

The previous subsection mentioned that Mastodon servers are compatible with each other because they use the ActivityPub protocol. But actually, Mastodon servers are only a subset of all servers that support ActivityPub. The “federation” of all ActivityPub servers is called the Fediverse. All Fediverse servers are compatible with each other: Mastodon accounts can follow accounts on non-Mastodon Fediverse servers and vice versa.

2. Pecularities of Mastodon

In this section, we look at traits of Mastodon that are unusual and may take some getting used to.

2.1. Important distinction: app vs. post page

The following explanation may not make immediate sense to you. You can revisit it later, after you have used Mastodon for a while. I find it important to make Mastodon less confusing.

There is one aspect of Mastodon that can confuse newcomers:

  • To use Mastodon, you have to use an app:
    • Either a web app that you use via a web browser. Each mastodon server is such a web app.
    • You can also install a native app: a mobile app on your phone etc.
  • At the same time, each post has its own web page with its own web address (URL). These pages are stored on your server.
  • Thus, each Mastodon server is both a web app and a website with one page per post.

That can be confusing if you use the web app:

  • You can only interact with a post (reply to it, boost it, etc.) if you are inside the web app, on your server.

  • Some links may send you to post pages that are not on your server and then you are outside your server’s web app (where you are logged in). You can check by looking at the current web address: Do you still see your server‘s domain name (e.g. mastodon.social)?

With a native app, you may have a similar problem:

  • You are seeing a post in a web browser but don’t know how to visit it inside your native app.

Here is what to do in both cases:

  • Copy the URL of the post.
  • Go to your app (your server or your native app).
  • Search for the URL.
  • If you click on the search result, you are now seeing the post through your app (much like you see objects through a camera). Now you can interact with the post.

2.2. Referring to accounts: account address vs. profile URL

  • We have already seen the Mastodon account address @[email protected].
  • Additionally, each account has a profile page where it describes itself. Such a page has a URL such as https://mastodon.example/@robin. As an example, you can take a look at my profile page.

In a way, both refer to accounts:

  • If you want to mention another account in a Mastodon post, you use @[email protected]. That will notify them that they were mentioned and will be shown as link that you can click to go to their profile.
  • When telling others about your Mastodon account (e.g. via email), the URL often makes more sense because they can immediately check out a web page.

If you want to follow someone and have either of those two IDs:

  • Go to your web app (=server) or native app.
  • Search for the ID – e.g., @[email protected] or https://mastodon.example/@robin
  • Clicking on the search result shows their profile inside your app. You should see a button that you can click to follow them.

2.3. Mastodon servers only see part of the Fediverse

In contrast to a centralized social network such as Facebook, a Mastodon server doesn’t see all of the social network that it is a part of (the Fediverse) – it only knows about the following posts:

  • The posts created by the accounts on that server.
  • The posts of the accounts that are followed by the server’s accounts.

What are the consequences of that?

  • Downside: If you search for something (other than an account address or a profile URL) then you’ll only get limited results.
    • There is ongoing work to create search engines for the Fediverse. Those fix this issue.

2.4. Does it matter which server I pick?

Short answer – it doesn’t matter much:

  • With extremely rare exceptions, you can follow anyone else on Mastodon, no matter which server they are on.
  • You can always move to a different server later and take your followers and followees (people you follow) with you (but not your posts, as of yet).

Many servers are homes for “communities”: people who have something in common – e.g., they live in the same city; speak the same language; are all interested in a particular topic such as music or sustainability; etc.

Therefore, choosing the “right” server has the following benefits:

  • Each server has live feeds with the posts created by its accounts and the accounts they follow. If a server is a good fit for you, you’ll see more interesting posts in those feeds. (However, that’s something I personally rarely, if ever, do. I only read what the accounts I follow post.)

  • Given that each server only “sees” part of the Fediverse, searches also often produce better results.

  • Each server has a different team of moderators. Those moderators perform a good kind of censorship and protect the server’s users from spam and other unwanted content. However, what is “unwanted” differs and can affect which servers work well for someone.

3. Getting started with Mastodon

3.1. Where to go if you need help

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