Welcome to all the people from India that are joining Mastodon in these days!!

#india #introductions and #followindia can be helpful hashtags to find other people just arrived here like you.

We understand that you are still unconfident with this platform, therefore here you will find some helpful tips to better understand how #Mastodon works:

- There is no such thing as "A" social network called Mastodon! Instead there are thousands of independent social networks called Mastodon Instances.
- Every Instance has his own server, community, rules, admins and moderation.
- Every Instance can interact with users that are on other Instances, exactly like email works (you can send an email from gmail to yahoo, right?).
- Every Instance can choose to silence or completely block another Instance (i.e. because permits bad behaviour)

On Mastodon you have 3 different timelines:

HOME - Like Twitter, shows all the posts of the people you follow

LOCAL - Shows all the posts of the members of your Instance

FEDERATED - Shows all the posts of the people that you follow and also the posts of people on other Instances that are followed by people of your Instance

The Instance you choose is very Important and depending on it your experience on Mastodon, the people you will see and the community talk will be very different.

On https://instances.social/ you can easily search instances based on language, interests and some badic policies. The suggestions about Instances on this website are more detailed and precise than the ones on joinmastodon.org

mastodon.social is one of the biggest Mastodon Instances. It's the instance created and run by the creator of Mastodon but it's not to be considered the 'official' Mastodon Instance because every single Mastodon Instance has equal power to the others.

The optimal strategy for Mastodon is not to rely on a bunch of gigantic Instances but on thousands of local Instances.

Try to imagine to have at least one Instance for every city, town, school or workplace, with a LOCAL timeline and a FEDERATED one.

Thousand of Instances all connected together and wiyh the possibility to share informations snd block the ones that permits trolling, harrassnent or bad behaviour but giving to every single Instance the freedom to decide how to act.

You can register yourself on multiple Instances and try yo see the difference between them.

Anyway, after some exolorations, most of tbe people prefer to stay on one single Instance that they will choose as their base (it's somehow like trying different telephone companies and then choosing one, but with the difference that in this case an Instance is not only a service provider but also a community made of people, with his own culture and rules).

If you want to change Instance is possible to transfer to the new one all your contacts and followers. This is only available if both the new and the old Instance run the latest version of Mastodon's software

There is no official App for Mastodon.

Instead there are many different Apps.

(Also here the similarities with email are helpful: there is no 'official email App', right?)

The most famous Apps for Android are:
- Tusky
- Fedilab

The most famous App fir iOS are:
- Amaroq
- Toot

Every App has is pros. and cons.
Some are free and some not.
Some are also on F-Droid, the open source 'store' fir Android.

Check out which one you find the best for your taste.

- Actually if you search something in the search box of Mastodon, it will find only users or #hashtags

- There is no function like 'retweet and comment'. That's by design, because is a kind of function that is mostly used to harrass people. Yes, I know, it's also useful for legit uses but, well, the point here is to prefer real interactions than boosts.

- There is also no Trending Topics and that's also by design. This confuses most of the Twitter users 😁. In fact, by removing it, Mastodon killed the urge to enhance CERTAIN arguments instead of others and all the 'social noise' about vapor-problems. Mastodon is a place where you can TALK with people without having to know by a TT board that a certain argomrnt is more important than the one you want to talk.

On every timeline ( HOME, LOCAL and FEDERATED) the posts are shown in chronological order.

This means that no algorythm, number of stars or other factors will influence the number of times you will see a post.

A post can be boosted ('retweeted') but that's it.