Skip to content

Prologue: Welcome!

Note

This guide is intended to apply to English-speaking Mastodon culture and adjacent, from the lens of a generalist instance.

This guide may not apply to Mastodon cultures of other (especially non-European) languages, or cultures surrounding other ActivityPub implementations.

Unless explicitly mentioned, this guide does not apply to small instances, such as those discussing specific activities (for example, amateur radio would be one, while tech in general is not).

Welcome to Mastodon (1) (and hopefully you've chosen mstdn.party / mstdn.plus as your instance, but if not, you're still welcome).

  1. Here we mean both Mastodon the software and the mainstream Mastodon culture, however for the rest of the guide it'll mostly mean the latter.

By now you have probably decided to try out Mastodon because you've heard about the benefits of Mastodon or the wider Fediverse, be it decentralisation, non-corporate, no-algorithm, open source, etc. However, dealing with Mastodon can still be challenging for many - new users and seasoned veterans alike - given that

  • it may be difficult to get the initial traction;
  • some aspects of the culture are invisible and/or challenge pre-existing assumptions; and

  • different groups of instances (1) have different cultures that sometimes go in conflict with each other.

    1. Sometimes the author considers them as individual federations.

It is with the goal of improving understanding of the cultural aspect of Mastodon and, to a lesser extent, the wider fediverse, that this guide is prepared for prospective and current users.

Scope of this guide

This guide seeks to:

Help you determine whether Mastodon is right for you

There is a lot of misconception on the exact benefits of fediverse or the mainstream Mastodon. You may want to revisit whether Mastodon is right for you to also learn more about the social dynamic.

Offer some advice on improving your experience

Discussions of techniques to find people/content to follow and best practices in interacting.

Non-scope of this guide

This guide will not address certain topics that are commonly present in other guides:

Reiterate technical definitions of the Fediverse

This is what most guides start with, and quite frankly, the author fails to see how it's relevant with most users:

  • the larger society in general is not full of techical users, but the technical aspect of fediverse has significantly biased the population towards technical ones, and
  • most content Mastodon users interact with likely come from Mastodon or other microblogging implementations, making explaining the existence of non-microblogging implementations unnecessary.

In most cases users will feel the federation - the domain in user handles should be enough. This guide will, however, discuss practical effects of federation.

Instructions on navigating the interface

If you are really interested in continuing using Mastodon, you will tinker with the interface and learn. This guide aims to tell you what you can't easily learn just by looking at the interface.

Compare to Twitter or Bluesky

The author has not meaningfully used Twitter (even before the Musk takeover) or Bluesky, and prefers not to discuss platforms that they have no experience with. The author, however, may cite external resources that may discuss such topics, and will discuss the rhetoric on comparing with other platforms as well.

Other resources