Dear lovely Mastodon folks: thank you for your thoughts and insights for my Mastodon primer, which is now live on Stuff: “What is Mastodon? All you need to know to switch from Twitter” https://www.stuff.tv/features/what-is-mastodon-all-you-need-to-know-to-switch-from-twitter/
Depending on how things go in the next month or so, it’s likely we’ll revisit in more detail in the new year. Again, I very much appreciate everyone who helped with this.
Review of a nice how-to-do-mastodon article
Very nice work, Craig. With your permission, I will share it on my status. A few things are interesting:
Where you write,
> So err on the side of caution by using larger servers, and donate to keep them alive
I'd beg to differ. I'd say sign up for _smaller sized_ servers and if possible, pay them to stay alive. The strength of this system is interconnected instances sharing posts and resources with each other. If everyone were to join larger servers, then we'd end up with a duopoly/oligopoly, and I am not sure if that'd be something desirable.
Posts can be MORE than 500 characters, for example the https://qoto.org instance allows 65K characters in their Mastodon apps, so you may want to revise 'up to' to be accurate.
On your 'Any other important stuff', you may want to add a couple of important things:
First, 'content warning' (cw) as a good practice and encourage people to write them often
and, ask your readers to describe their images when they post images on #mastodon, because it helps people with limited vision to experience the image descriptors and also, as we say in #Aotearoa, it is about manakitanga.
Fediverse is all about kindness and being good and gentle.
As for
> Mastodon is the most Twitter-like alternative out there
This is debatable. #mastodon is part of the #fediverse and there are other apps that mimic twitter/birdsite more closely than mastodon. For example, sites based on #pleroma or #misskey mimic twitter better and there are twitter like skins as well.
For a really well-written article, you may want to consider some of these points.
Review of a nice how-to-do-mastodon article
@arinbasu Thank you for the notes. You’re of course welcome to share. Based on your advice, I’ve made adjustments. A couple of things have been left as-is, primarily due to the nature of the audience. (For a Stuff reader, “most Twitter like” will be taken in context as comparing to Facebook, Tik-Tok, etc.)
I’ll mull over the server thing. I had the opposite advice from some others, hence what I wrote up. I do get the point regarding ‘opolies’ tho.