An EXTREMELY Simple Guide to Mastodon (for when someone says it's too complicated to catch on)
An EXTREMELY Simple Guide to Mastodon (for when someone says it's too complicated to catch on)
Did somebody tell you it's too confusing?
PS- The "real" (non-joke) full guide for the Masto-curious is here.
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Except you need to choose an instance, can not find your frienda because they chose another one and after a few weeks you find out the admin of your instance is quitting if you didn't choose mastodon.social
I get that searching can be a bit finicky sometimes but doesn't typing in a full username of a user you want to search for usually do the job?
That part about shutting down is something that https://joinmastodon.org/covenant tries to help with, where advance notice should be given and multiple people should have access to administrative actions. At least if the server has to shut down the users are given enough time to look at another server.
For the search you need to know the instance someone is on, I have had the issue of knowing someone is using mastodon or compatible service and even their username, but not the inatance they're on because I don't know them personally.
The one largeish local instance that shut down recently had the covenant in the server description, until one day it wasn't and the server shut down in a month.
Switching servers leaves a lot behind. You can only force your followers to be switched to the new account and export and reimport your own follows. But everything you had posted gets left behind. You can download the whole archive for yourself, but can not currently republish it from the new account.
Still it's the best social media I have used this far and am expecting it became garbage in a few years now that it is getting popular, because they always do. But let's have fun while it lasts.
Ok, but their username includes the instance name so it doesn't really make sense that they'd be trying without it.
It's like if people just tried to send an email to "walop" instead of "walop@yahoo.com", it also isn't going to work. Where you have an account is important.
That's a shift from monolithic providers like twitx or reddit. It's something people have to get used to (and honestly that the fediverse could do a better job about making clear; most fediverse systems try to hide this where they can which adds to the confusion)
People had this same problem shifting from monolithic providers like AOL back in the day and everyone got used to emails being what they were.
FYI you haven't needed to choose an instance in the official app for a while now. It just defaults to mastodon.social unless you request otherwise.
Not ideal long-term to have it be centralized like this, but it's still leaps and bounds preferrable to Twitter or Threads.