What Is Mastodon?
It’s designed to be a decentralizedalternative to Xand other popular social media platforms controlled by a single company.
Its decentralized nature, however, means there’s no central authority or company controlling the platform.
Battenhall / Unsplash
Battenhall / Unsplash
How Does Mastodon Work?
Mastodon is built on afederated connection, which means it’s not a single website.
Each server is independently owned and operated, and you’re able to choose which server to join.
Mastodon also supports content warnings, custom emojis, avatars, and more.
However,joininga server is simple and works a lot like other social media sites.
What Makes Mastodon Different?
In one word: decentralization.
This is why Mastodon is vastly different from Facebook, Tumblr, Instagram, and X.
This means anyone can set up their own server and customize it to meet their specific needs.
This level of transparency and community involvement isn’t present on other platforms.
Finally, Mastodon says it will “never serve ads or push profiles for you to see.
That means your data and your time are yours and yours alone.”
How Do I Join Mastodon?
To join Mastodon means to join a specific community within the connection.
This lets you do things like post in a server and follow and contact other users.
There’s alsoMastodon Instancesthat provides other filtering options.
Read through the rules for this server, and then selectACCEPTat the bottom of the page.
Create your account by filling in the text boxes and selectingSIGN UP.
SelectVerify email addressin the confirmation email you were sent.
You should receive another email welcoming you to the server.
Read the community’s rules and then tapI Agree.
Read the privacy policies and then tapI Agree.
How Do Mastodon Usernames Work?
When you sign up with Mastodon, you aren’t joining the whole website at once.
Therefore, when you join a different community, you’ll get a unique username.
Dealing with usernames might feel like a barrier that’s stopping you from using Mastodon to its fullest potential.
But they’re easy to grasp if you think about them in the context of an email service.
A Gmail user’s email might beusername@gmail.com, whereas a Yahoo email might beusername@yahoo.com.
FAQ
Compared to X and Facebook, Mastodon doesnt even count as a rounding error.
That could be a very, very good thing, however.
As of January 2023, Mastodon had about 1.8 million active users.
Yes, you’re free to.
Your posts on the old server will remain there, they cant be imported to the new server.
