The IT Nerd

Thanks to Elon Musk’s incompetence or desperation, or perhaps both, Twitter is now the hellscape of toxic behaviour, racism, and bad behaviour that he promised that it would not become. That is sending people running from Twitter to Mastodon. The best way to describe Mastadon is that it is 2014 era Twitter that is made up of decentralized servers and it has no adverts. A big plus is that it is completely open source and isn’t controlled by any one person or organization. That decentralization does create a bit of complexity that you need to navigate if you want to join Mastodon. Thus this guide hopes to help to make this process easier by breaking it down all the required steps in bite sized chunks.

Step One: Choose A Server

To join Mastodon you need to join a Mastodon. Like I said earlier, Mastodon is made up of decentralized servers. So choosing one is your first task. You can find servers by choosing by geographic region, language, topic registration process and whether or not they’re hosted by individuals or organizations. All servers on the official Mastodon site have agreed to follow the best practices of the Mastodon Server Covenant. In my case, I am on noc.social because that one is tech focused, and I am a tech guy. But if you need some help with that, I would recommend that you visit instances.social which has a wizard that can help you to select the best server based on your interests. You might want to read the server’s about us page to make sure it’s a good fit for you as well as reading the server rules to make sure that you don’t break any of the server’s rules.

Step Two: Join The Server

Once you’ve chosen a server, your next step is to join it. Each Mastodon instance will have its own sign-up process, but majority of Mastodon servers work like this:

• You provide a username.
• You provide your real email address and a password,
• You check the box agreeing to the terms of service and server rules and click “Sign Up.” 

You’ll then see a notification asking you to check your email for a verification message. Click the “Verify email address” in that email message, and you’re done. You’ll have a username that looks like this:

@USERNAME@Server.com

Where @USERNAME is the username that you chose and @Server.com is the name of the Mastodon server that you joined.

At this point you can not only start to follow people that server, but you can follow anyone in what is called the “Fediverse” which is the federation of all official Mastodon servers. So in short, you’re not missing out on anyone that you might want to follow by joining a specific server.

Now if you want to follow some people who are prominent on Twitter and have moved to Mastodon, this list will help you with that. And if you want to follow me specifically, I can be found on Mastodon at @The_IT_Nerd@noc.social and I am currently cross posting all my stories there along with interacting with people as well.

Should you have any questions, drop me a note in the comments and I’ll try and help you out. In the meantime, you can enjoy your hellscape free social media platform.

This entry was posted on November 13, 2022 at 9:41 am and is filed under Commentary with tags Mastodon. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.