Tech Tips / Beginner's Advice to the Fediverse (Mastodon)
I signed up for Mastodon in late November last year. I didn't use Twitter or anything prior. It was purely just a new experience, after my last experiences with text-based social media, was ermmm Miiverse. I like Nintendo alright.
Today, I wanted to give you some beginners advice to Mastodon and the fediverse, and hopefully help you sign up to a federated platform!
Part 1: What is a fediverse?
To start, I sorta need to tell you what the fediverse is right. No it's not some marketing nonsense about the future.
I’m going to use a quote from the popular website (and Mastodon account) fedi.tips offering advice on Mastodon and the fediverse to explain this.
“The Fediverse (or “Fedi”) is a collection of thousands of independent social media servers that talk to each other seamlessly. This means that the millions of users on these servers can interact with each other as if they were on a single social network.”
This communication is done through an open standard known as the ActivityPub protocol, which was introduced as a standard in 2018, by W3C (World Wide Web Consortium), which made standards for a lot of other web based stuff as well (such as HTML and CSS, which is being used here right now).
This allows for easy communication through the different servers, whether it's running Mastodon or some other server software. How about we explore some of the other software in fact, in the next part!
Part 2: Different types of fediverse server software
So, we talked about fediverse server software, and I wanted to discuss some that you could choose, and why you shouldn't necessarily use Mastodon.
Mastodon is obviously the main one, it's a general-purpose type of software, like Twitter. The main things to outline is that the character limit on posts is 500 characters, and it's quite basic. There are some forks that add more features to Mastodon, such as glitch-soc, but I want to really talk about the general Mastodon that everyone talks about. Mastodon supports uploading content such as images, video and audio up to 40MB in most cases. Oh, and it also supports editing which is pretty nice, which you don't have to pay $8 for.
An alternative to Mastodon can be Calckey / Misskey. I'm focusing on Calckey here since it has some more features. It adds a lot more features onto something like Mastodon, such as having a total of 3000 characters in a post (although Calckey counts the amount of characters used differently). It also gives you the ability to quote-boost a post, which Mastodon unfortunately doesn't have. Searching on Calckey is also way better than Mastodon. I didn't mention before, but you can only really search hashtags and users properly on Mastodon. Meanwhile, on Calckey, searching actually works for keywords! [Image 1: Calckey, Image 2: Mastodon]
I think it's pretty clear which one is better. Calckey also has some cool features on the web experience, such as having a RSS feed on the top!
From this point, I don't have experience with any of the other services unfortunately, but I'll still try and explain them.
Pixelfed is essentially an alternative to Instagram, where it's primarily image based.
PeerTube is an alternative to YouTube, which means it's going to be primarily video based. Videos are distributed by a peer to peer network, which may expose your IP to other people though.
I think that's about as much as I want to talk about. There's Akkoma, it's pretty similar to Calckey in some aspects, but it supports editing and doesn't have as much customisation. Again I've only used Mastodon and Calckey, so I'm not the most qualified to talk to you about other stuff.
If you're not a new user to the fediverse, and you want to know about some more technical differences between the server types, calckey.org (which I’m pretty sure leads nowhere, but that's what the developer of Calckey told me to credit lol) has a nice organised diagram to help you out.
Unfortunately there's no key to that diagram, but it will help you if you're not a new user, and you don't know whether to switch. Anyways, once you're set on the server software, which servers should you actually choose to call home? We will explore this in the next part.
Part 3: Choose a server to call home
So, we've explored server software, but I haven't actually told you about where you should call home!
The truth is, I can't really make a perfect suggestion here, since you might be better being on some servers depending on the topic or language.
One piece of advice I can give you is to not join mastodon.social if you've decided to go for a server running Mastodon. This server has an estimated 1/7 of the entire fediverse using it. It's better to ideally choose a smaller server, since it will put you less at risk from a rich person from buying out your server and doing what they want.
Anyways, if you're looking at joining a Mastodon server, consider looking at joinmastodon.org. It lists over 200 Mastodon servers which are about various topics.
You can also check out fedi.garden, which contains a wider variety of servers. Both this and joinmastodon.org requires certain standards to be met to be listed, such as notifying users within 90 days of a server closure.
I've made a megathread that you'll be able to access by clicking on the link below if you want to take a look at other sites like the two I've mentioned.
https://mstdn.social/@experiencersinternational/110267815625544287
Hopefully you managed to find a server that suits you. I might update this page overtime and add additional sections, but this is it for now. This guide should have been able to explain the concept of the fediverse, different types of server software, and I've given you a list of sites that showcase different servers.
Oh, one last thing I'd like to add for now. If you want more tips on the fediverse, please visit https://fedi.tips.
For now, take care!