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feedyourdeadnametothevoidfish:

Hey you! Worried that tumblr might disappear? Want a place to express yourself online but don’t want to dive into the nazi ridden hell pit of twitter or the orwellian nightmare of facebook? Mastodon* might be just what you’re looking for!

What is Mastodon?

Imagine a social network, but instead of one giant service run by a faceless corporation, it’s a true network comprised of small, friendly instances (many of them run by queer people). Unlike the big corporate sites, where if you have a problem there’s no one to turn to, on Mastodon there’s a good chance you’ll know and be friends with your instance admin. Like twitter and tumblr, you can post text, photos and videos, follow and message your friends, reblog their posts and become part of a community.

What features does Mastodon have?

It has some great features that are sorely lacking from other platforms

• Built in content warnings – whenever you post, you have the option to put a content warning on the post so that people can choose if they want to view it or not. Use of content warnings is strongly encouraged!
• Built in image descriptors – any image or media posted can be given an image description that appears as alt text, improving accessibility
• Built in blacklist/filtering – automatically hide posts that contain keywords you don’t want to see
• Audience settings on a post by post basis – want to post something that only your followers can see? sure! want the whole world to see it? that’s fine too! you decide with every post, and don’t have to restrict your whole account
• Approved followers – you can choose to approve new followers before they’re allowed to see your content
• Ability to silence and block users – prevent them from interacting with you entirely, or simply hide their posts from your timeline
• Chronological post order with no bullshit algorithms – this shouldn’t even be a thing, but unlike all the big social media platforms you get to see the posts from people you follow, in the order they were posted. No ‘posts we think’ll you’ll like’, promoted posts, adverts or any other bullshit affecting what you see and the order in which you see it

I’m in! Where do I sign up?

The first thing to remember is that Mastodon isn’t a single service, it’s hundreds of small ones. So there are many different instances to choose from. I recommend starting with this list of instances with good anti harassment and anti bigotry policies – https://instances.noct.zone/

Simply choose one that matches your interests and sign up. You can have accounts on more than one instance, so if the first one you pick doesn’t fit you then you can simply move to another. Make sure to read the rules and policies of your instance when you sign up, as each instance differs.

My friend signed up for a different instance, can I still follow them?

In most cases, yes. When you sign up for mastodon, your handle will be @username@instance.name – for example, I’m xaphania on the monsterpit.net instance so to find me you would follow @xaphania@monsterpit.net. Like email, if you use gmail and your friend uses hotmail, it’s still possible to communicate as long as you know their full address.

It is possible for the admins of an instance to silence or block other instances. This means that you may not be able to follow or see posts from that instance. This is usually only done in drastic cases to protect users, for example where an instance allows harassment or bigotry. You can also choose to block instances personally, if you want to avoid all people on a particular instance.

Do I need an app?

The short answer is no – you can access mastodon directly through the web page of your instance. It will automatically scale the site for mobile use, and looks great on my phone so this is how I choose to use mastodon. However there are a number of different apps for Android, iOS and other platforms, so check out your app store and try some out if you want

Sounds perfect – what’s the catch?

Well it’s far from perfect. Many of the problems of social media still exist, and harassment is still possible, though there are better tools to deal with it than some platforms, and it has a personal touch that’s missing in corporate social media. It’s also not a completely secure platform, so if there’s something you absolutely don’t want some people to see – don’t post it on mastodon. It’s possible (though generally unlikely) for an instance admin to see anything you post, including private messages. But then, it’s possible for employees of twitter or facebook to do the same! Also, since instances are generally run by hobbyists out of their own pockets or small donations, sometimes instances close down or disappear, taking your posts with them. So if you want to post something that will stay online forever, then find somewhere else to host it. But if the worst happens and your instance shuts down, there’s others you can move to!

*Technical note – Mastodon is the most common piece of server software in the wider network called ‘the fediverse’. There are other servers, such as pleroma which are similar but may have some different features. But because they all use the same protocol to communicate, it’s possible to follow and interact with someone regardless of what software their instance runs. For the interests of simplicity, I have used the term Mastodon throughout this post to refer to the whole network.

also many instances allow adult content (with appropriate content warnings) so if you want a place to post your lewds after 17th December check it out