mstdn.social is one of the many independent Mastodon servers you can use to participate in the fediverse.
A general-purpose Mastodon server with a 500 character limit. All languages are welcome.

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Hey new people and those thinking of joining, you do NOT need to sign up on huge servers!

You can follow and interact with people on any server from any server, the servers are connected.

It would really, really help the network right now if you could sign up on medium or small size servers. You will still be able to follow and interact with whoever you want, and the network as a whole will work much better.

A good safe place for beginners to find servers to join is joinmastodon.org/servers

joinmastodon.orgServersFind where to sign up for the decentralized social network Mastodon.

p.s. By the way, a lot of the servers on joinmastodon.org/servers say "get on waitlist" but this phrasing is misleading.

A lot of these servers don't have a waitlist at all and will accept you pretty quickly, within a few hours in some cases. It's just the server admin is screening out spammers by switching on the "why do you want to join?" form, because spambots find this form harder to cope with.

joinmastodon.orgServersFind where to sign up for the decentralized social network Mastodon.

@feditips so, kinda like sharing an email address. In fact, the format is exactly the same as an email address.

@threepio

Yes, it's because the federation structure on here is similar to email: lots of independent conventional servers exchanging messages, and no one controls the network as a whole.

@feditips what happens if you join on a server that the owner later decides to just delete?

@Jonobie

The servers on that list have agreed to the "Mastodon Covenant" involving reliability and moderation. They have promised to give a certain amount of warning before closing down. I think the warning period is three months?

This gives you time to transfer your account to another server, including your follows and followers:

fedi.tips/how-to-use-mastodon-

fedi.tips How To Use Mastodon and the Fediverse: Basic Tips | Fedi.Tips – An Unofficial Guide to Mastodon and the Fediverse An unofficial guide to using Mastodon and the Fediverse

@feditips according to this explanation, it is a bit misleading then when you sign up and you're told to "choose a server, but don't worry, you can later move to a different one", as you can't transfer your posts (which I'd argue is an important part of one's account).

I guess I need to decide soon where I'm likely to want to stay, before I post too much... :)

@RuthiBrandt @feditips
At a pinch in the even of a server vanishing you could feed your profile to the Wayback Machine for archiving, and download a copy of all your posts directly from the instance for the record too.

@wiredfire @feditips but that doesn't help you add them to your new account, does it?

@RuthiBrandt @feditips

It does not. But the content doesn’t need to vanish entirely. It’s a trade-off for sure, but on balance I believe we get a lot more form Mastodon / fediverse than we lose.

@wiredfire @feditips oh this wasn't a dig at Mastodon, or the fediverse. I'm quite excite by this place potential 🙂

I just think the 'you can easily move your account later' thing needs to be a bit more accurately explained (and maybe the celever tech people will find a way to solve this issue at some point? 🤞)

@RuthiBrandt @feditips

The biggest thing that is really coming out of the current influx of new users, is that mastodon, and the fediverse, could definitely do a lot more to help communicate the core concepts to newcomers interested in exploring these spaces.

@wiredfire @RuthiBrandt @feditips
And ideally in a way that is easy for people without tech knowledge to understand. Many of my friends run away just seeing the word “server” without some clear , reassuring context.
As it is now, not only does a newbie have to do some digging to add people on other instances (and even that sometimes fails at the search level), but the mastodon site is unclear on how that person joins at all. It’s there, but not in the front page and not very clear.

@brookhinton @RuthiBrandt @feditips

Any new platform has a learning curve, but onboarding could certainly be easier here.

Still, there’s some high profile accounts that offer a great deal of guidance & increasingly I’m seeing Joe Public see enough noise to push through to see what it’s all about.

I’m sure it’ll get better when the Mastodon team have a chance to address it and aren’t busy fielding media requests & putting out server fires 😅

@Jonobie @feditips As long as you get a warning in advance, you can export and import your account into other servers. If you do not trust the server, a monthly export as a backup might be a good idea - or moving to a trustful server.

@sofiii @feditips thanks, sounds like there aren’t really any software guardrails though if someone just decides to drop a server? That feels faintly precarious as this all gets bigger, although it’s good to see things like covenants for not doing it. (I started to look at running my own server, though the one in English I saw seems like everything is “temporarily unavailable”, I’m guessing due to the current surge? masto.host/pricing/ )

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@Jonobie @feditips Yes, it is worrisome (with every Internet service). It is enough to when an account gets deactivated.

I expect that one of the apps will provide an automated backup function. I will do it manually from the website until I figured something out:
mastodon.social/settings/expor

Maybe someone else knows more about an automated backup? #mastodon #backup #help

Mastodon hosted on mastodon.socialMastodonThe original server operated by the Mastodon gGmbH non-profit

@feditips Unfortunately the waitlist instances don't seem to appear on the app. Have been fielding a few concerns on the blue bird from folks concerned that Mastodon doesn't support art...

@BenjaminNelan @feditips I experienced this too! I was disappointed to see that the "food" section was empty, but then later I found a food server when I lookedon the website

@feditips why won’t mstdn.social come up,in list of servers? how can I move to that one?

@feditips yep, at social.linux.pizza it was minutes before I got my invitation.

@feditips I'm sorry if I'm asking something off topic, but any way I can view the list of hashtags I followed?

@feditips If there are countless ways of opening an account with one’s own name, how do you stop countless imitations? Surely someone could copy your name & just have a different suffix/group.

@anstey

This kind of address system has been around since the beginning of the internet, so the problems and solutions are well understood.

It's important to pay attention to the server part of the address because this tells you where the account actually is.

For example, the European Union has lots of official accounts on here and we know they are official because they have "europa.eu" as their server. Only the EU has control of that site.

Email has the same issues and solutions.

@anstey @feditips one thing you can do is post a bit of code on a website you own to prove your identity & connection to a particular fedi account. it’s in the mastodon options under profile, i believe.

but it’s basically the same problem as an email address, right? how do you keep people from impersonating your email?

@feditips is there a way at all to see the timeline of other servers?

@neilh90

Yes, go to their website! You don't have to log in, just click "Local" or "What's happening".

@feditips The phone number simile is great! If I exchange phone number with my friend, we don’t need to be using the same wireless service. Maybe one is Bell, while other is Rogers. We can even be in different countries!

However, social platforms are forcing us to use the same one. If I’m on twitter and my friend is on Facebook, well, one of us have to move. It also applies to WhatsApp, telegram, iMessage….

Mastodon might be the best chance to take back users’ right to use different servers.

@zhenboli @feditips In addition to that, it doesn't even have to be Mastodon for participating. As Mastodon is just "the brand of the phone you are using". There are other tools capable of interacting live with Mastodon accounts such as Pixelfed, friendica and more. They all contribute to what is called the #fediverse.

@feditips I ended up signing up for an account on two servers, any recommendations for best practice?

Should I delete one? Guessing better to do sooner than later.

It does seem to be different crowds on each. Can I consolidate the people I’m following to one account & still see the same stuff?

@feditips You really do though.

No one wants to constantly have to switch back and forth between browser tabs while copy and pasting URLs into a website search bar to interact and respond to posts. It's terrible UX.

@feditips how do I see what others post in response to a post? I think there are 7 responses to this but I cannot read them.

@feditips I am finding it impossible to follow people from the link they send. I get this message. I am using chrome on android. The search bar on the left is not operational, I can't search for either users or hashtags. Any advice you could give would be appreciated.