What is Mastodon and how do I find people? An article with some FAQs woven through it.

@cassolotl@dev.glitch.social

It's got separate instances, which are kind of like subreddits... but you follow people, like Twitter or Tumblr... and it's described as a less evil Facebook, but it looks nothing like it...?

I wrote this to answer some of the questions I see over and over again. Hopefully it'll help some people out. :)

What exactly is Mastodon? It's more like Twitter than anything else. Posts are limited to 500 characters, so it's a microblogging platform where you follow people you find interesting.

Do I need to make an account on each instance I want to connect to? No. You can follow anyone from any instance, kinda like how you can email someone on Gmail from your Hotmail account.

Which instance should I join? Probably just pick whatever from the instance picker, and then post a friendly public post saying "I'm interested in x, y and z - which instance should I join?" and someone will probably reply with a recommendation. Check out the code of conduct to get a feel for it. When you join an instance you'll automatically be following the admin.

How do I find my friends? You can ask them for their @username@instance and put it into the search box - you will need their whole username and instance to find them this way. Or you can use this tool - you log into it with your Twitter account and your Mastodon account, and if your friends have used this tool before then it has saved their details and it'll give you their Mastodon profile in the form of @username@instance, which you can put into the Mastodon search box.

How do I make new friends? This requires a whole section...

Finding cool people

There are many ways!

Post a public post introducing yourself

Include the hashtag #introductions, and tell the fediverse about yourself. Include your interests and the things you post about, and make those interests hashtags too. Hashtags are the only way to find people whose names you don't know using the search box, so they're really important for helping other people to find you.

Search for hashtags

Type a hashtag into the search box and press enter, and it'll show you all the public toots known to your instance containing that hashtag. Try hashtags of your interests, but also try #ff and #followfriday and #fediversefriday - people share the usernames of people they enjoy following on Fridays.

"Hey, I'm into #cooking and I'm looking for folks who post food photos and recipes and stuff. Reply if that sounds like you! Could people boost this to get the word out? Thanks!"

Make sure it's a public post so it'll be visible in the local and federated timelines.

Check out the local timeline

That's the timeline of people on the same instance as you, not geographically local! If you've joined an instance that suits your interests, you will probably find cool people here. Because it's only on your instance, this timeline will be less busy - especially if you're on a small instance. If there's a lot of other languages going on there you might like to adjust your language checkboxes in settings - check the boxes of the languages you don't understand and they'll be filtered out of the public timelines.

Check out the federated timeline

This one moves a lot faster. It's every post known to your instance. Anything:

Posted by someone on your instance
Posted by someone followed by even one person on your instance
Boosted by someone on your instance
Boosted by someone followed by even one person on your instance
Searched for by someone on your instance with the toot's URL

Replies don't make it into the federated timeline unless it's a reply-to-self/thread thing.

Again, if there's a lot of other languages going on there you might like to adjust your language checkboxes in settings - check the boxes of the languages you don't understand and they'll be filtered out of the public timelines.

Put your @username@instance in bios on other websites

How do you find people on Twitter? It's not always on Twitter, right? People put their Twitter @username on their blog, on their business card, on their name tag at conferences, in their YouTube videos...

Start sharing your username, and people will find you. It's a great way to find them back with very little effort, since you get new follower notifications on Mastodon.

Searching

The search box is weird, and deliberately so - it is limited to prevent abuse. This section is intended to describe exactly how it works, so that it's less mysterious and frustrating. You can use it to search for:

People. It'll give you people that are known to your instance based on usernames and display names.
New people. If you find someone's @username@instance elsewhere online or AFK and you enter it into the search box it'll find their profile even if it's not known to your instance yet.
Profile URLs. If you enter the URL of someone's profile (like http://dev.glitch.social/@cassolotl), it'll find their profile for you. If your instance already knows this person, entering the URL will update profile pictures, bios, etc.
Hashtags. This will show you any public post that contains the hashtag and is known to your instance.
Toot URLs. If you enter the URL of a toot that you found elsewhere, it'll provide you with the toot and you can reply, boost it, save it, etc. (If it's not known to your instance yet it'll also put it into its federated timeline, so others will see it too.)
Posts. Any toots you posted, liked, or boosted will be searched in a plain-text way.

So, you can see that the search doesn't search the entire fediverse - just the parts that it knows about or that you can tell it about very specifically with a URL.

So hopefully this has answered some of your questions! If you have more, please do feel free to contact me directly on Mastodon by starting your post with @cassolotl@dev.glitch.social - I'm usually happy to answer questions. :)