An unofficial guide to Mastodon and Fediverse | Hacker News Reader

An unofficial guide to Mastodon and Fediverse

fedi.tips

57 pointssaikatsg37 comments

>How do I join?

>The easiest way to get started is probably to join a Mastodon server. The easiest way to do that is to sign up on the Mastodon website.

So I head on over to the Mastodon website, and I'm shown a list of 40 servers that I can choose to create an account on. Most them are very niche - either dedicated to a specific country or city, a cause, or some sort of tech scene. There's no obvious way to find out what the experience is like on any of these servers, just a button to "apply for an account". If I click on that, some of them will show me a selection of posts, although it's unclear if those posts come from that specific server or from elsewhere.

How am I supposed to decide where to create my account?

It doesn't matter? Or rather pick a fast one and one that has rules you can obay. it doesn't matter, as all servers talk to each other anyway.

How do I know whether an instance is "a fast one"? If it doesn't matter, why am I even being asked to join a server at all?

How is a new user supposed to know that it doesn’t matter? Also, if it doesn’t matter, why are users asked to choose?

It's been hilarious watching people fleeing Twitter hop onto Mastodon and then try to report/ban people over there. The disconnect is amazing.

Can you elaborate on this? Does Mastadon not have a reporting feature or something? I don't use it or Twitter, so I'm sorry if this is a stupid question.

It just initially came across to me like "people leave social media platform due to poor reporting environment, move to new social media platform with no reporting environment", but I assume I'm misinterpreting somewhere.

Mastodon does have a reporting feature - but remember there are thousands of decentralized servers, all with their own rules. You might be able to find a server that will match your censorious desires and act on your reports - but you aren't going to wipe people off the platform wholesale. There is no central committee for content policing. It's kind of the point of the whole platform.

So instead of reporting, as others have pointed out, just put on your big boy pants and ban people you don't want to see in your own feed and stop wasting various server admins time. The problem is many on the left aren't content with merely curating their own feed - they feel some moral imperative to save the rest of us from people they see as pRoBlEmAtIc too. Hehe - that isn't going to work on Mastodon - again, by design.

This could have been an interesting comment until it injected "The problem is many on the left...". The first paragraph stood on it own.

It's still relevant to the core conflict. Some may not like it being stated out loud - that still doesn't make it any less relevant or true.

All you reveal with that statement is that your posts tend to irritate people on the left. There are plenty on censorious people on the right as well, but you'd have to post lefty stuff to run into them.

Thank you very much for the information, I feel like I understand what's going on now.

Honestly I kinda like that design now that I understand it. Thanks again!

Any good examples?

A pretty good discussion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7bYXMLGqwO0

I still can’t believe Twitter banned h3h3. Guides like this will hopefully let high profile celebrities jump ship.

I can't believe h3h3 was shocked someone actually enforced the rules on him. Also pretty hilarious seeing him complain over what he has celebrated against others many, many times over the past few years. What a whiner.

Getting banned was the point, to illustrate Musk's blatant hypocrisy towards his own ideal of free speech.

Impersonation isn’t really free speech.

Neither is hate speech and calls to violence. But Musk has made it clear that he is a proponent of that kind of speech under the umbrella of "free" speech.

Hate speech is free speech in the US. Calls for violence is not included.

lol - the rules for verified Twitter users (remember Ethan has the coveted blue check) are very clear on renames. BECAUSE HE HAD THE BLUE CHECK him renaming his account has greater weight. The whole point of the blue check is to validate that it's h3h3 - not that he's Elon Musk. As a verified user he has greater responsibilities - which he violated. Trying to frame this as a free speech issue is absurd.

BTW - these rules were in place, before Elon bought Twitter. The only difference post Elon buying Twitter is those rules are now being enforced universally, and not selectively. I can see why that upsets some people - too bad.

He had a blue check which means his identity was verified, and then he changed his identity to impersonate someone else. That has always been against the rules. He is free to tweet about how much of an asshole Elon is (free speech), he wasn't free to pretend to be someone else when his identity was already verified. Otherwise, what is the point of identity verification?

The blue check does not mean verified moving forward. It now means you are a paying subscriber.

>The blue check does not mean verified moving forward.

Just what are you basing this on? I've seen lots of people toss this around - where specifically has Elon or Twitter said that $8 will be a license to do whatever you want? If anything they have been adamant that will NOT be the case.

Here, specifically: Twitter has officially announced that the blue check mark does not mean "verified". Here's a tweet: https://twitter.com/esthercrawford/status/159010953045281587.... She says, "The new Twitter Blue does not include ID verification – it’s an opt-in, paid subscription that offers a blue checkmark and access to select features." A number of commenters of course then ask, "Then why do you keep calling it verification?"

I did not state that $8 is a license to do whatever you want. Twitter has said that Twitter Blue is now going from $5 to $8 and that it will include the badge, less ads, and priority positioning in replies. Nowhere did they say that giving them money for Twitter Blue was going to require anything more than it already does.

That transition is obviously not complete yet, since it's just announced. In the meantime I'm sure he'll be fine on Mastonod or whatever it is these influencers are moving to.

Newbie to Mastodon here. I read that Mastodon has thousands of instances. But when I go to the Mastodon page (https://joinmastodon.org/servers), it lists only 40. And there's no search function, so I can't find an instance that I know exists because I already have an account on it (mastodon.online). (I want to open a second account on the same server.) What's the deal with that? How can I navigate to a server I know exists but which isn't shown? When I navigate to mastodon.online on my browser, there's a "Create account button", but that just takes me to the Mastodon page I'm talking about.

Just going to echo something that's been said a bunch - I think having to choose a server to register on is going to be a huge barrier for people interested in Mastodon.

Following the "easiest way to sign up" link takes me to a list of servers with no clear default choice. The top few options all require applying for an account, and are for special interests (Ruby/Anarchism/Animation Professionals). The first "open" server is for the Glasgow area. I think tons of people will give up at that point.

At the same time, enshrining some general-purpose server as the default try-this-first one, would run counter to the core idea of Mastodon, so there's no clear solution to this problem.

I don't see it as a problem at all. It's finally forcing people to be more active in what they consume, rather than passively choking down spoon-fed filtered crap.

I am very active about what I consume on twitter. I follow exactly 6 people and sort the timeline as chronological.

I think the disconnect is that I'm just not interested in making a statement about my identity. My social media accounts aren't me, they are mine. I additionally don't want a feed full of people who just echo the same things I think.

That's fair - maybe it's a feature not a bug. I think that having a somewhat high-effort sign up process will prevent mass adoption of Mastodon, but maybe that's not the goal.

> "The most obvious shift in such a future is that there won’t be one big, central system. Instead of everyone posting on The Single Twitter, there will be lots of servers for people to post from. I’d expect most companies, government agencies, churches, and ad-hoc organizations will have their own server."

Or how about web pages with backlinks and maybe Disqus on the page for comments?

What I'm missing from this guide is what to do when your Mastodon instance suddenly goes offline, like with mastodon.technology for example.

Am I able to transfer my followers, follows, my "toots", my unique handle and restore it on another instance so that I can regain operations as if nothing happened?

Mastodon is a Confederation as no central authority moderates all instances.

https://blueskyweb.xyz

Actually is Federated.

> Actually is Federated.

The site shows me

> Sign up for the Bluesky private beta

So is it already real and if so how can the beta be private?

I just saw a post from the Economist in the federated timeline, looks like the migration or at least the use of Mastadon is starting to gather momentum.

I was JUST wondering this morning about how to figure out where to start on Mastadon, guess I'll have to give this a look tonight.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com