Hello! You've probably arrived here because a friend of yours is trying to get you to use Mastodon. Well, fear not. If you wish to proceed, I will make this as easy for you as possible.
Mastodon is basically a Twitter clone at its core. But the technology it sits on is very interesting. Mastodon is built on a protocol called "ActivityPub," which was created by the same standards body which created the web as we know it (HTTP, HTML, CSS, etc.).
ActivityPub is decentralized and federated, meaning anyone can run their own server and anyone can see what's on someone else's server. Think of it kind of like email: if you have a Gmail account, you can send emails to someone with a Yahoo account and receive emails from someone with an Outlook account. Each of these companies (Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft, respectively) runs their own email server and they interoperate with each other. ActivityPub is like that, but for Twitter. Anyone can run their own Twitter (or Mastodon) server and see tweets (or posts — or... toots 🤦🏻) from anyone else's Twitter (e.g. Mastodon) server.
Aside: Well, ActivityPub isn't like that just for Twitter. It actually works with a whole variety of social network types:
- YouTube
- Goodreads
- Medium
- Meetup
- And even Tumblr is adding support for ActivityPub soon!
Not only can you follow people on other Mastodon servers from your Mastodon account on your Mastodon server, you can also follow people on PeerTube or Pixelfed servers from your Mastodon server! (but that's for the advanced user's guide)
However, using Mastodon doesn't mean you have to set up your own server (though you can if you want! again... more in the advanced user's guide...). A lot of people have already set up servers and you can create an account on their server.
You can browse a list of the open Mastodon servers (instances) here, but if you're just looking for a server to get started with:
- Mastodon.social (the canonical Mastodon instance)
- Univserseodon
- Mozilla's Mastodon instance (coming soon)
You can create an account on one of the above instances using one of the above links. I recommend also contributing some to the server you choose if you end up using it a lot, since they don't show ads and don't have any other way of making money:
One good way to find people to follow on Mastodon used to be to use tools that would scrape your Twitter followers to see which of them were on Mastodon and give you links to follow them there, but ever since King Dipshit unceremoniously and without notice shutdown Twitter API access such tools aren't woking anymore.
Edit (2023.02.16): Twitter said they were shutting down the API these tools rely on last Monday, but this doesn't seem to have happened yet. So, for the moment these tools work, but they could stop working at any moment. If you're going to use them, this is possibly last chance to do so:
- 🐦 Debirdify
- 🔍 Fedifinder
- 🐑 Flock
In lieu of that, you can browse the "Federated" and "Local" feeds of your instance and find interesting people to follow. The "Local" feed is a firehose feed of all the posts from everyone with an account on your instance. The "Federated" feed is a firehose feed of all the posts from everyone that anyone on your instance follows or is followed by.
Once you are following some people on Mastodon, you can use tools like Followgraph to analyze all of the people you follow and see people they mutually follow to find new people you might like following.
You can continue to use the official web app from your instance (mastodon.social or universeodon.com) and/or the official mobile app, but they're not the best experiences you can have. I recommend trying out alternate clients:
There's really only one choice for a 3rd party web client for Mastodon, but it's a really good one. Elk is well designed, well engineered, and the user experience feels a lot like Twitter, with inline threaded replies and a similar layout. It works as a progressive web app (you can install it on your computer or phone) and gets regular updates which you can accept or dismiss right within the app.
- Free (but you can sponsor continued development on GitHub)
There are a lot of good choices for iPhone and iPad Mastodon clients, but the standouts to me are:
An extremely solid app from the developers of the Twitter client Tweetbot. The scrolling is smoother than any other client I've tried. The in-app icons are fun and stylized. And there are enough features there now to make it more useful than Tweetbot was for Twitter, with even more planned in their public roadmap.
- $1.99/month or $14.99/year
Mammoth (beta)
A very solid beta app from developer Shihab Mehboob, known for his other apps such as Vinyls, Get Sum, and Aviary for Twitter.
- Free (during beta)
Unfortunately, the state of 3rd party Mastodon clients on Android looks rather bleak, but it seems the best client right now is either the official client or Tusky, which are both free. If you're using Mastodon on Android, you might also consider installing the Elk PWA on your device, since Android has pretty good support for progressive web apps.
If you want to share a Mastodon link on iMessage and have it show up with a rich preview like a Twitter link, you can use mstdn.link:
- Use the website to generate a link
- Manually construct a link, using the formula
mstdn.link?to={url} - Use the share Shortcut on iPhone/iPad
To use the iOS Shortcut:
- Long press on the link you want to share (or otherwise open it in the share sheet)
- Tap "Edit Actions..." at the bottom of the share sheet
- Add "Copy Mastodon Link" to your Favorites
- Tap on "Copy Mastodon Link" from the share sheet
- The link is now on your clipboard
- You can paste the link in your iMessage chat and send it
- The link will appear as a rich preview, like Twitter links appear