Let it not be said that I’m whinging about mastodon without offering any solutions! Even if the solution is Yet Another Explainer, I guess I’ll yeet one out anyway.

What is mastodon? One way to think of it is as a mashup of Twitter, Discord, and email.

Like Twitter, people use it primarily for microblogging. People post short blurbs of text, or photos, and follow other people doing the same.

NOTE: You need not actually sign up for mastodon to see someone’s posts (assuming they’re public). It is perfectly reasonable to bookmark a favorite writer and just read.

Unlike Twitter, people aren’t all dependent on a single website run by a single company, owned by a single oligarch. Instead…

Like Discord, people are on different “servers,” or instances because we nerds don’t actually speak normal English when not required to. I’m currently on fifteen (15) different Discord servers, so when I want to talk about #sudoku I switch to one of those servers, and when I want to talk about #AIart I switch to one of those servers, and so on. But…

Unlike Discord, you need not actually join each of fifteen different servers. You can visit other servers, and follow people without joining the server they’re on. Also, even though they use the term “servers,” Discord server are all still dependent on a single company behind the scenes.

If you’re familiar with Discord, you might be wondering, how does that work then? How do I go see what’s going on in the world of #Mothership without visiting the Discord server dedicated to it? And that’s where the email comparison comes in.

Like email, you don’t need to share anything with another user to communicate with them. Maybe you use one of the big ones, GMail, Yahoo!Mail, or Hotmail. Maybe you use an email address provided by the telephone company that provides your internet connection. Maybe you use a work email address. It doesn’t matter, you can send and receive emails from any of the above, no problem. And yes, I’m glossing over some things there, but the point is, you pick your email service provider because of the user interface or the features or the price or because it’s forced upon you or because someoone else set it up for you. It doesn’t matter much.

And that’s key, and confusing! When you decide you want to join mastodon, it’s not like joining Twitter or joining Discord, it’s more like “joining email.” Because you don’t actually join “email.” Instead, you sign up for an email service. Chances are good that you sign up for GMail or Yahoo!Mail, because they’re free and easy and well-known.

So it is with mastodon. You need to sign up for a mastodon service. Don’t overthink it! If you sign up for one and later decide you wish you’d signed up for one with a cooler name or that several of your friends all ended up in one place, or you just learned there’s an instance dedicated to tabletop gaming that you’d have signed up for if you’d only known, that’s okay! Because…

Unlike email, when you switch servers, everything comes with you! Your followers are still following you and your posts are still there.

That’s enough explained for now. Mastodon isn’t super-smooth everywhere, but that’s part of its charm. It’s also not super-toxic unless you join a toxic server. So don’t do that! If you want to pick a server on your own, there are links at https://joinmastodon.org for that. But if the whole thing seems really overwhelming and confusing, let’s make it easy.

I’m going to list eleven servers, all of which as accepting new signups as I write this, and all of which are “general” servers, no particular focus or specialty. You can click on each to decide which one “speaks to you” most, or you can click on one at random and just sign up! I picked these manually as good general-interest servers, and then suffled them into artbirary order using https://onlinerandomtools.com/shuffle-lines so I’m showing no favoritsm. Just pick one!

https://ohai.social/about
https://mstdn.party/about
https://c.im/about
https://home.social/about
https://universeodon.com/about
https://mas.to/about
https://mindly.social/about
https://mstdn.social/about
https://mastodon.world/about
https://mastodon.sdf.org/about
https://federate.social/about

And that’s my #mastodon #explainer