F.A.Q. - Frequently Asked Questions

This article is a draft! A lot of info might still be missing and the page might change at any time.

This is the protocol of a (series of) workshop(s) held by @PaulaToThePeople for Fediverse beginners, especially those who came to Mastodon after Musk bought Twitter.

What is Mastodon?

Mastodon is a free software mictoblogging project, so similar to Twitter, with some features that are the same and some different features.
It is decentral/federated and part of the Fediverse (see below).

When you just created an account you'll see the basic interface with an empty home timeline. You'll have to fill it by following people.
To follow someone from a different instance you'll probably need to enter their full handle (username@instance.tld) or their profile's url in the search field.

In the Settings you can change some things about Mastodon's look and feel. For example you can switch to the advanced interface where you can have many columns.
You can for example search for a hashtag and then pin that column to the screen be clicking in the top right corner.
If you have too many columns, they won't fit on the screen and you will have to zoom out.

You can create lists of people, e.g. people who's posts you don't want to miss, and also pin that list as a column.

The home timeline shows posts by accounts you follow and boosts by those accounts. It will look the same no matter if they have a Mastodon account or use a different Fediverse service.
The local timeline just shows posts by accounts on your server. No boosts. The federated timeline shows the whole known Fediverse - known to your server that is. An account is known to your server once it is followed or was ever searched for by someone on your server.

What is the Fediverse?

Mastodon is just one part of the Fediverse.
On Mastodon, on your timelines it may look like you're only seeing Mastodon posts, but many of them may originate from other parts of the Fediverse.

All of these different services in the fediverse can communicate with Mastodon and each other.
It works similar to email. You can write to someone who has gmail from an icloud account, for example.

Besides microblogging there are services for picture-blogging, music, podcast, books and so on.

What is Pixelfed?

It works similar to Mastodon, but the interface looks more like Instagram than Twitter and you can only post and see picture posts.
Some special features include the ability to add license information for your media and adding your posts to collections.
Users from Mastodon or other parts of the Fediverse won't see the license information or collections though.

   if you want to actively use a certain fediverse service, you always also need to start an account there, but passively you can follow accounts throughout all the fediverse and their content will appear in your "home timeline"

Questions from the people

How to find people on other services?

You usually need to know their full handle or the url of their profile to find them with the search function.
So it works the same as finding people on other Mastodon servers.

How to find people of niche communities/with special interests

You can search for a hashtag, click on it and see posts by people using the hashtag.
You can also find a server that is dedicated to the topic you are interested in (e.g. here) and find people on the /discover page of the server (only Mastodon servers).

How to find people you know from Twitter

Tools like fedifinder will crawl the info of everyone you follow on Twitter for fediverse accounts, you can download it as a .csv file and import it into your account.
Put your Fediverse handle into your Twitter profile so other people can find you.

How to choose the right server?

First think about which service you want to use. Mastodon, Pixelfed, ...
Then think about the size of the server. Very large servers go against the whole idea of decentralization/federation and especially currently they might be overwhelmed from all the new users. Also they attract hackers.
Very small instances might appear very sleepy and you'll have to discover lots of people to follow yourself.
Then think about if you want a general interest server, a themed server or a server local to where you live.

Some links:

• Special Interest Instances
• Local instances
• joinfediverse.com - small instances ready for new users
• fediverse.pary (Themed Servers)
• instances.social - instance picker (check out the advanced mode for some interesting details like security quality)
• fediverse.observer - filterable list of all servers
• DE: Deutschsprachige Mastodon Instanzen

How to move to a different instance

There is a guide in English, German and Japanese here and one in German here.

Slide-in: On deleting posts

"The internet doesn't forget and the Fediverse can't forget."
Because servers need to crawl each other, a post you delete may still be visible on another server.

Will Mastodon/the Fediverse remain niche?

It grows every time the big commercial platforms f**k up, but because it's not centralized, everyone can create their own niches (which need not even be connected to the rest of Fediverse).

How to best share audio, pictures and movies?

For media, especially videos with bigger file sizes, it's better to post them via Peertube and then use the link to this video in your Mastodon posts. If you want to share a Youtube-video, you should use invidious.snopyta.org or another invidious instance to create a tracker-free link, because a lot of users don't like sharing their data with big tech companies.

Is it sensible to have several accounts, so for Mastodon, Pixelfed, Peertube, etc.? And how to connect them?

It can make sense to have more than one account on different services, especially if you want to share different media.
You can use the same handle for all of them, but the full handle will be different, so e.g. @PaulaToThePeople@climatejustice.social (Mastodon) and @PaulaToThePeople@climatejustice.video (Peertube).
You can link from one profile to the other, but they will always remain separate accounts.

Do Mastodon servers generally have the same technical features or are there relevant differences? If so, can I check this out before joining or moving?

Most servers have the same features and limits. Some have higher limits for e.g. characters in a post (climatejustice.social has 5.000 instead of the usual 500).
Also limits for poll options or number of bio-links can be adjusted by the admins, but might create problems for every update.
There is generally no easy way to find out about special features before joining a server unless you ask around.

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I'm actually on Friendica and not Mastodon (not sure if that was a great decision but I also didn't want to overthink things). On my server there are not as many people, I think, so if I use the search bar I often find nothing at all. People probably then tend to choose servers where there's already a lot of people to make it easier to get connected. So could we say that, while trying to decentralize social networking, fediverse still has those mechanisms that automatically lead to more centralization?

   one instance/server can block users on other servers or even a whole other server

   Are there specials servers for govermental accounts

   in Germany there is social.bund.de which is invite only

   there is also an EU-server

   there is no offical verification system in the fediverse like on Twitter but there are other ways to check, if an account is legit:

   certain servers are invite only, so only legit users can create an account there

   every account can create a verified link-back to their own official website

Accessabilty-Feature:

   Glitch-Soc has a feature where you can see red boarders around pictures or videos without alt text

   there's a BOT that reminds you, if you've forgotten alternative text / description