Setting up Mastodon
I hope everyone had a good and safe start to the New Year. I have been enjoying Mastodon more than I originally realized/thought I would and I wanted to provide some links to a good “getting started” article for Mastodon
My biggest “beginner” suggestion is to find and follow a few fairly active accounts, and then when they “boost” someone interesting, follow those people as well. If you’re trying to “migrate” from Twitter, there are a bunch of tools to try to find the people you follow there, including Fedifinder and Debirdify, but the one I found to have the cleanest interface, and the most useful (and allows one-click following) is Movetodon
I am trying to level up my Mastodon usage and am exploring #hashtags and will be trying the lists feature:
This is a useful feature whether or not you use the advanced view on Mastodon. If you follow enough people that there is a relatively active flow of new posts, I’ve found that lists are a super useful way to focus in on more interesting stuff, without it becoming overwhelming. This is the same thing that I did with Twitter in the early days, creating a series of “lists” of users, so I could narrow down what I’m following for specific purposes.
I am what John Siracusa calls a “Twitter/Mastodon completionist” so I like to read ALL the posts in my timeline, which means I cycle through those I follow as you can only read so much. This made the birdsite hard in the end even without the other concerning trends. Mastodon is not an algorithm based so what you see is what you see, which is a joy.
If you’re looking for an app I have been loving Ivory from Tapbots, which is amazing and shows the best in an indie app (which is why I love writing on a Mac/iOS).
And if you’re looking for a librarian-ish server to join I can recommend the libraryland.social server.
This is the home away from home for librarians and other information professionals wanting a safe space to communicate, collaborate, and share.