Tag: social media

Exploring Mastodon Continued: Timelines and Federation

Posted on by Scott

While checking out the Mastonaut desktop client for Mastodon, I came across the following diagram explaining the visibility of a toot:

The Visibility of a Toot

Still reading? I appreciate your patience. I don’t blame any of the folks who noped out of this post after seeing that diagram. It’s a consequence of the servers thing I mentioned in my previous post on exploring Mastodon. It’s one of many features that highlight who the target audience for Mastodon really is (people like me who used to write software for a living, or still do).

Even for me, the Home timeline is the only relevant one because it will display toots from people I follow–regardless of what server they’re on–toots those people boost, and your replies. The Local timeline shows toots from people on the same server where you registered whether you follow them or not. The Public or Federated timeline appears to show toots from people across all the Mastodon servers (again, whether you follow them or not). We’ll see if more time on Mastodon confirms or changes my understanding of the timelines.

Exploring Mastodon Continued: Verification

Posted on by Scott

As I mentioned at the end of my first post on Mastodon, I’ve been following Martin Fowler’s notes on his own journey.  His November 1 memo on verification interested me, especially in light of Twitter’s recent update to charge $8 for the blue check mark.

As Fowler explained it, Mastodon being decentralized (unlike Twitter) means verification is up to each server.  Whoever runs it can verify members however they wish–or not at all.  The approach to verification he describes and implements is what he calls cross-association.  By adding a <link> element to the <head> of his personal website with an href attribute for his corporate Mastodon profile, Mastodon “sees” the link and marks it as verified.

I followed Fowler’s example to do the same thing with my Mastodon profile.  I updated the header.php of the WordPress theme I’m using this way:

<head>
<meta charset=”<?php bloginfo( ‘charset’ ); ?>”>
<meta name=”viewport” content=”width=device-width, initial-scale=1″>
<link rel=”profile” href=”//gmpg.org/xfn/11″>
<link rel=”me” href=”https://mastodon.cloud/@genxjamerican”>
<?php wp_head(); ?>
</head>

With that change made, my Mastodon profile now looks like this:
Mastodon profile with verified metadata for a website

This way, people who follow me on Mastodon know that I control this website as well.

Navigating the Latest Social Media Shakeup: Exploring Mastodon

Posted on by Scott

In the wake of Elon Musk closing a deal to buy Twitter (after trying and failing to back out due to buyer’s remorse), the scramble to explore alternatives reminds a little bit of the very early days of social media.  I’m old enough to remember social networking sites like Friendster and Orkut, and there were plenty of others I’ve forgotten who never gained critical mass and flamed out.  I joined Twitter in 2009, and over the past 13 years it has grown to become the social media platform I find the most valuable.  Having heard people mention Mastodon in the past as an open source Twitter alternative (Trump Social even tried to use the codebase without attribution), I created an account—@genxjamerican@mastodon.cloud—to see how Mastodon compared for myself.

TL;DR

I’ve only been on Mastodon a week, but if I were to try and distill my advice of getting started into just a few points they would be:

  1. Follow @joinmastodon on Twitter first to start learning more
  2. Use a mobile app to smooth out (some) of the rough edges of the experience (including account creation)
  3. See if people you already follow on Twitter are cross-posting on Mastodon and follow them first

Signing Up

I don’t recall why I chose mastodon.cloud as the server to sign up with, but creating an account was straightforward enough.  It appears to be one of the largest Mastodon servers, along with mastodon.social, the original one operated by the German non-profit of the same name.  Using the official Mastodon mobile app, or one of the third-party apps makes the process a little slicker.  Stick with one of the largest servers unless you come across a particular server/community that really interests you.

Following People

I started by following people I know from Twitter who signed up for Mastodon and still post on Twitter.  The Fedi.Directory is where to look for interesting accounts to follow.  Their account (@FediFollows@mastodon.online) has been a good one to follow for someone like me just starting out.

Unfollowing, muting, blocking, and reporting all appear to work similarly to the way they do on Twitter (though I’ve had no need to do any of those things after so short a period of time).

Enough Lurking, Time To Post

A post (or a reply to a post) in Mastodon is called a toot, and they can be up to 500 characters long.  Sharing the post of someone you follow is called a boost.  You can favourite posts as well, though that only puts the toot in a list of your favourites (instead of sharing that fact with whoever follows you).  You can add content warnings (CWs) to your posts, so someone has to click through to see the content.

Posts can include pictures, but it doesn’t look like you can post videos. I follow @AmiW@mastdon.online and she posts pictures of street art from all over the world.

You can also send direct messages to people–if their accounts allow it.

There does not appear to be any such thing as quote-“tooting”.

What’s Next?

For me, spending more time on Mastodon exploring the features and looking for bigger and better guides to and explorations of Mastodon by others.

Martin Fowler is writing a whole series of posts on his exploration of Mastodon that I’ll be following with great interest.