So you want to try out Mastodon? here’s everything you need to know
Explore
, Local
, and Federated
tabs.
@name
.
When people talk about Mastodon being decentralized, they mean that it’s not one big system but thousands of independent servers joining together. Think of it a bit more like email; you can be using [email protected]
and your friend is [email protected]
, but you can contact each other despite using different services because the protocol (email, in this case) is the same.
local
, federated
, and explore
view
local
view is intended to only show you posts from the server you’re logged into.
This will include people and accounts that you don’t follow, as long as the post is set to be visible (and not, for example, followers only).
[email protected]
, and you follow the official [email protected]
account, your server (mastodon.site
) will then know about mastodon.social
if it didn’t already. It will start checking regularly with the server to find new posts from all of the accounts it’s following there.
username
bit and the @server.com
bit, like an email address) in your home server. You should see them and be able to add them in the same way as if they were local.
What often catches new Mastodon users out is if you follow a link to someone’s profile but you’re viewing it on their server - you can tell because the address bar will be their server and not yours. Your Mastodon username and password only work on your local (home) server. Trying to follow a profile from their server will show a Take me home
box. Instead of clicking follow here, you can copy their full username and search for it on your local server’s search.