Twitter exodus?

It's my second attempt at exploring Mastodon, an attractive Twitter alternative. I haven't noticed much activity there earlier, and it ended up with a ghost account on mastodon.social. However, the October'22 mess around Twitter impacted the situation change. Since the Twitter exodus, the Fediverse network met activity like never before.

This time the former server was so crowded that hardly usable. So I decided to migrate to a small Mastodon instance, according to my interests, the functional.cafe. My new Mastodon home is @baldram@functional.cafe. From the settings/profile, I went through the intuitive process "Move to a different account". An essential step lets you move your followers and set a redirection. Then, of course, there's also Import/Export I didn't need, as the primary migration was enough for me.

From now on, I have a redirection from the old account to a new place.

You might explore available servers here or look at the map using the "Mastodon Near Me" project (see this post). Are you into science? You might find groups to connect to fellow academics.

After moving away from the overcrowded server, it's all good! Imagine a bus and crowds of people trying to get inside over its capacity. Let's take the next one.

It would help the network right now if you could sign up on medium or small-size servers.

Servers are connected

No need to sign up on huge servers. You can follow and interact with people on any server from any server, all are connected.

How does it work?

The Mastodon is only a part of the bigger thing called Fediverse. Many federated servers around the social networking and micro-blogging idea. For communication, they use open standards like ActivityPub. Even a WordPress might act as a Fediverse server.

Look at Fediverse platforms, and those are not all: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fediverse .

So Mastodon is one of the players in that network. It doesn't matter where you are. People can see each other. What is interesting is the flexibility that Fediverse gives. For example, you can follow a Pixelfed profile (a kind of Instagram platform) from your Mastodon account.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPSbNdBmWKE

User experience

As a former Twitter user, you'll feel at home. There are plenty of Mastodon mobile apps, and they work similarly. For Android, you might pick a friendly Tusky app. For iOS, you might like the excellent Toot!

https://joinmastodon.org/en/apps

Account verification

You might ignore "verified" emoji (fake) badges. However, there are still ways to verify account.

A superb option is that Mastodon can cross-reference the links you put on your profile to prove that you are the owner of those links. This simple solution allows you to verify your blog site or GitHub account. Thus also, the Mastodon profile is verified. PS: If you're a Hashnode blogger, consider upvoting this feature request.

See how it looks.

Thanks to Jan Wildeboer for sharing the "Github hint".

Exploring, learning and discovering

The Fediverse network might amaze. Many features that you'll discover step by step. E.g. you can add Fediverse account feeds to your RSS reader using this: https://[instanceDomain]/[@username].rss. The other exciting feature is that the app allows for pinning hashtags. It's also about some basic functionality missing on Twitter, like the Edit button and upcoming features, e.g. the "ability to filter followed accounts' posts by language".

Security

Remember to set Two Factor Authentication on your new Mastodon accounts. The option is available from Settings / User preferences / Account / Two-factor Auth.

A migration to Mastodon