an emergency guide to the fediverse, made easy:
"so twitter is exploding and you really want a microblogging social media", the guide.
alright, so it's july 2nd, 2023, and yesterday while enjoying a relaxing and slightly miserable sick day with my fiance i discover that the birdsite of twitter has exploded.
this is fine, i guess. rate limited between 600-1,000 tweets a day. sure. whatever. i am making a crash course guide to the fediverse, because since switching to fedi i have been in love with it! and i'd like to make it easier for folks who don't
really care about decentralization to get into it. so, let us begin!
updated last: 10/23/24. look for the shiny sparkles for brand-new things! sorry to all the canadians who just got the block feature ripped from you. R.I.P
what is mastodon / fediverse?
note that you dont need to understand any of this to join fedi, so feel free to skip this box if you don't care about the technicals!
The Fediverse is a giant Network of social media services.
There are platforms for microblogging, blogging, photoblogging, videohosting and much more and they are all interconnected or federated.
So you only need one account to follow users on any of the platforms.
"but what the fuck does this actually mean, miles." you are saying. i hear you! let me try and break this down further.
the fediverse is essentially a bunch of social media sites and hosted versions of these sites ("instances"), a la old style forums, that interface mostly seamlessly with each other. (we'll come back to this in a few minutes.) an "instance" is akin to sites such as tumblr's url system, or even this site right here - it's hosted on neocities, right? so you could say that this website, citadark, is on the neocities.org instance! i also compare it to email providers a lot - you can email your friend's hotmail from your gmail account. it's the same concept.
once you have an account on an instance, you can follow, reboost ("retweet/reblog", essentially; shortened to just "boost" often) posts, like posts, ect. from any instance - not just the one you're on. if you remember forums, think of it like this: you can browse all the threads on the forum you're on, but you can also hop over to other boards and post from your forum's account to the other forum boards. (or let's get even more basic: imagine posting to your weird aunt's facebook post from your instagram account, or your twitter. coming together as a big picture now?)
imagine posting to the neoboards from a chickensmoothie account, if you've ever touched an internet pet site game before; or flight rising to neopets. it's like that!
what this means is that your one account on your instance ("exampleinstance.cool" for the sake of explaination) can be used to do whatever to other instances, without needing a seperate account per instance. if your friend is on furry.gay, you can easily follow them from youraccount@exampleinstance.cool and reboost their posts, whatever, without needing an account on furry.gay.
however, something else fediverse can do is... "federate". what this means is that you will have, on the website version of mastodon/etc, a "local" timeline that is only people you follow akin to what a good twitter/tumblr timeline is supposed to do... and a "federated" timeline you can switch to, which will display posts and users from all instances that interface with folks you follow and the other accounts in your instance.
this means if exampleinstance.cool has 40 people in it, you will see the other 39 people's posts in your "federated" timeline without having to follow them -- plus scatterings of posts from folks that those folks follow, boost, and like! it's a good way to learn of new instances and follow new people - but if you're on a private or smaller instance, such as myself, you will take a while to build up a good federated timeline because you'll need to follow other folks first so there's more "forum boards" to interface with.
this extends to search - searching on your instance, i cannot stress enough, will only return posts and users that are signed up to your instance or are federated with it via users you follow. if exampleinstance.cool suddenly only has 4 people, you are going to have to follow a lot of folks to get that federated timeline and your search to be twitter-level of content finding. this is maybe the biggest downside to being on a small instance, but i do think the pros outweigh the cons here.
so let's recap: fediverse is the collective name for mastodon and other social medias that are 'decentralized' and interface with each other from individual instances. your one account can interact with everyone elses' even if their provider is different from yours. there is no entire fediverse-wide search option and discoverability grows with the size of your instance and how many people you follow/follow you.
how to join the fediverse: it's actually not too complicated
phew, okay. this is actually way simpler than explaining what the hell this is to begin with.
step one:
pick an instance.
it really doesn't matter what instance you pick. find one that fits your interests - just do some cursory research and read the about of whatever instance you're considering joining!
some instances you can look through include:
by no means is this a complete instance list. hell, if you want to start your own single or two-person instance, it's about $6/month plus whatever url cost you pay (mine is $7/year). but hopefully this gives you some jumping off points!
if you have signed up for bluesky at any point: this is the EXACT SAME SERVICE as the provider drop-down box. bluesky is sort-of federated, like a weird walled garden. the only difference is that there is no corporation providing you a drop-down list of prebuilt providers, you have to go pick one!
so, pick an instance, hit the "sign up" button, and you're off to the races. (some instances may require manual approval and you'll get a confirmation email; just make sure you read through instance rules/info!)
step two:
edit your profile.
preferences > profile on the right hand side of the screen (desktop), or "edit profile" above the postbox on the left hand side of the screen (desktop). add your bio, icon, dn, you know. etc.
step three:
introduction hashtags!
making a post with the hashtag #introduction, as well as any interest hashtags (#furry, #gay, etc) will put those posts in your instances' federated hashtags. which means other folks will see it, and maybe follow you! you don't
have to do this step, but if you're looking for random folks to follow, it can help.
i cannot stress enough, once again: there is no entire fediverse-wide search option. to reiterate, especially if you skipped past the first chunk of this: "searching on your instance
will only return posts and users that are signed up to your instance or are federated with it via users you follow.". so follow people! use hashtags! these are your main methods of being discovered!
okay, now what - using the site?
so now you're all signed up, maybe you have followers, maybe not: now what?
first of all, app options: don't use the official one. look, it's very barebones. it sucks. your options are:
android users:
- Mastodon PWA
- Tusky
- Fedilab
- Tooot
IOS users:
- Ice Cubes
- Toot! (paid)
- Ivory (paid)
- Mona
i personally use ice cubes, it's a tiny bit slow (and getting better every month!) but it's free and very, very intuitive. also lots of haptic feedback. i love haptic feedback.
following other instances: what the heck is a search?
remember that "mostly seamlessly" earlier? yeah, here we are. to follow other folks/hashtags from other instances, it gets slightly irritating: you need to copy their url - say, arceusjudgement@furry.gay, and
paste it into your instance's search bar (default location on desktop is top lefthand corner). hit enter, and voila; you can follow from there.
the same goes for individual posts; paste them into your instance's search bar to interface with them.
however. there is one other desktop-based solution!
graze is a chromium & firefox browser extention that basically removes that step and you can just hit "follow" / "boost" from wherever.
gchrome,
firefox.
note: i have had it block multiple websites for 'crypto mining' in extensive use, so if you get some weird blank websites, disable graze for a hot minute.
threads 101: if you respond to your own post, it will automatically thread! if people expand any post in the thread, your responses will be listed first - no matter if other folks have replied in between your posts. pretty simple, and it makes organizing information very easy.
you can
pin up to 5 posts to your profile, and i recommend doing this
because you will not see a user's full post timeline from other instances - your lovely posts at youraccount@exampleinstance.cool will not show up to someone looking at your profile from furry.gay...
unless, that is, you've pinned posts! pinned posts will show up automatically on all instances! by default, when you pin a post it goes to the very top of your profile - so just pin and unpin posts until they're in the order you want.
post privacy: the best feature, actually.
you can set these for each individual post! you can set a default! essentially, "unlisted" makes it so that they won't federate to other folks' federated timelines, while follower-only... is what you'd expect. like a locked twitter. and speaking of locked,
locking: pretty easy!
however,
unlike a locked twitter, you can leave posts visible to others if you want! if you have it set to follower-only by default and require follow requests, that's basically the same thing as a locked twitter - folks can't boost those posts, either. freedom of choosing what posts to allow loose in the wilds without needing a seperate unlocked account!
used tweetdeck?
so did i! i used tweetdeck from 2014. what if i told you... you could make mastodon look like tweetdeck?
navigate to your settings, then to
preferences, then
appearance & check that little box that says "advanced web interface". voila!
you can also make
lists, which i believe was also a twitter feature (R.I.P). by default, this is on the right-hand side of the page blandly marked "lists". you can add fedi accounts & hashtags to a list to create a small organized feed of specific things; for example, i have a list titled 'local' that follows seattle hashtags so i can get a feed of just seattle stuff!
there are also a few live feeds by default: "home" is your chronological timeline of exclusively people you follow and their boosts,
"local" will be posts EXCLUSIVELY from accounts in your instance whether you follow them or not,
"federated" will be everyone you follow, plus posts from
their instances/following and so on/so forth, which makes the "federated" feed a pretty wide net and a good way to find more people to follow and art and stuff! personally i just bounce between home and federated, but thats why there's options!
some general site courtesy & culture tips: you can add
alt text to images by clicking on the "No description added." text on the image after uploading (desktop) / "description" or "alt text" (mobile). it is
highly, highly encouraged you do this; alt text makes images accessible for screen readers.
alt text is a brief description of the photo that contains all of the relevant information you want to be conveyed by glancing at it. fun fact, all of the images in this guide have alt text! here's the alt of the image i just posted:
alt="a screenshot of the post box with an image uploaded; the image options are 'DELETE' in the top left corner, 'EDIT' in the top left corner, and at the bottom, 'No description added', where you add alt text."
try not to write a novel or get too funny with it; just convey as accurately as possible what you would get from glancing at the image yourself. other folks have made very comprehensive guide to alt-text writing that i will try and link in the extras / deeper dive section below.
another thing you can do is
content warnings; these put your post behind a marked little drop-down you click to access, and they're used
very liberally for anything from NSFW content to potentially triggering content to just general negative content so people can opt in!
click 'CW' to add content warnings to your post, and type them in the 'write your warnings here' box. on mobile,
this is instead a triangle with a ! in it: ⚠️.
some very common ones i use and see regularly: "-," for negative posts / venting, "pol" and "uspol" for politics, "eye contact" for selfies that... well... you get the idea, and "NSFW" / "TMI" for... again, you get the idea.
honestly, i use these pretty liberally and advise you to as well -- it literally just makes the post an extra optional click in, conveys a lot of relevant information quickly, and also saves space. no downsides! you're helping folks
and keeping your posts organized!
tangentally, remember how i mentioned bsky earlier? well, if you wish to instead interact with fedi from your bsky, you can
bridge your bsky into the fediverse.
note that not every mastodon instance will be federated with bsky bridge. in fact, probably a good chunk of them won't be, because bsky is kind of not well moderated. still worth giving it a shot if you want a temporary solution!
how do i move instances?
here is a very thorough guide to moving instances! when you move instances, your followers & posts come with you! however, your username must be re-created on the new instance; this shouldn't be too big of a problem, but in the unlikely event your username is somehow taken on the new instance you're migrating to... well. not much that can be done about it.
deeper dive: for those who want to learn more
"miles, is this seriously it?" you are saying to me. "it sounds so fucking
complicated how can this be all there is to it?"
this is because i've cut out a
lot of details that folks love to talk about for the sake of simplicity. but perhaps you want that, now. perhaps you want to learn
more.
luckily, i love talking and sourcing.
however, none of this is neccessary information to get started and you can close the tab here if you're satisfied with your brand new fedi account! <3
de-centralization: what the heck are those?
decentralization is the polar opposite of many big social medias. twitter, youtube, tumblr, tiktok, all of those are
centralized - that is, they are owned and operated by one company on that company's group of servers.
conversely, decentralization is the opposite: every fediverse instance is run by a person or group of people paying for their own small server costs, hosting their version of whatever fedi codebank they're running, paying for their domains, etc! this is good, because if one instance starts getting taken over by a space rodent named meon tusk and swirling the drain, you can just switch instances (options are under the same place as having a locked account)! even if that instance explodes, the entire fediverse will be essentially unchanged. don't like admins, instance rules, whatever? move to a new one! you're untethered! you have no chains and no cage!
fediverse also includes things such as
a reddit-like - lemmy and kdin -, and i believe their own video hosting and streaming platforms, but i haven't really delved too deep into those yet.
however, all of this is essentially why so many of your favorite hacktivists and programmers probably have a fedi! there is a
lot of customization, most projects are open-source, and there are a good handful of codebanks to use - mastodon has become synonymous with fediverse, but it's far from the only one! i know of misskey and akkoma just to name two, and frankly, there are many talented coders out there getting very freaky with it. it's very cool.
this does come with its own problems. as mentioned before, discoverability is a bit strange and those looking for insane twitter engagement should not have those expectations here. small instances may go the way of old forumboards and explode sometimes, and while you can move instances pretty painlessly, it still.. runs that risk. (although apparently so do big social media sites, so what do i know.)
i'll also address one thing: people were very freaked out about mastodon being able to access your DMs and such for privacy concerns in 2022, and i will note: this is true of any social media. it's just that fediverse instances are run by smaller groups of people, rather than corporations; as long as you do some cursory research (that is to say, look at the damn about of the instance) you won't run into any insane instance owners. people... don't really care about who or what is sliding into your DMs, i promise.
guides: the masterpost
mastodonmigration's quick start guide that is actually extremely technical and not really "quick" at all
texan_reverend's help masterpost
mibyledraws' guide to alt text!
"how the fuck do you find anything if it's decentralized?" you may ask; word of mouth is powerful. people who love making websites and webrings are even more powerful than that. between other fellow neocities users and folks from another alternative social media, cohost, you can find a
lot of fediverse folks fast.
