DT Intro: We love Mastodon and have a large community there. With all the disruption currently being experienced across social media, people are looking at their options. We are, therefore, happy to share this comprehensive guide to getting started on there and, by extention, gaining entry to the Fediverse!!
Fedi.Tips is an informal, unofficial guide for non-technical people who want to use Mastodon and the wider Fediverse.
Browse the contents on the index below.
All text in this guide is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 4.0 (CC BY-SA 4.0) ⧉,
Full attribution is owed to https://fedi.tips
Mastodon and the Fediverse: Beginners Start Here
- What is Mastodon? What is the Fediverse?
- How do I join?
- Do I need multiple accounts? Do I need to join lots of servers?
- Who owns the Fediverse? Is it owned by a corporation or venture capital firm? Can it be bought out by Google/Facebook/Elon Musk?
- Who sets the rules on the Fediverse?
- Who gets to start their own server?
- Why is the Fediverse on so many separate servers?
- What if a server misbehaves?
- Does Mastodon or the Fediverse use ads or trackers or algorithms or blockchain/cryptocurrency or anything annoying like that?
- What is a federated network?
- What other kinds of servers are on the Fediverse?
- What’s that rainbow pentagon thing that everyone seems to use on the Fediverse?
- What do I do next? Are there any other guides to Mastodon and the Fediverse?
How to use Mastodon and the Fediverse: Basic Tips
- Which server should I join?
- So, I’ve heard mastodon.social is the best server to join? Bigger is better, right?
- Which apps can I use?
- What’s my account’s address? How do I follow other people’s addresses? How can people follow me?
- Can I use my account to log in on other servers?
- Customising your profile
- How do I find people to follow?
- What kind of accounts can I follow from Mastodon?
- How do I get more followers?
- How to be notified when someone posts
- Where are the trending posts and hashtags?
- How does search work? Why are hashtags so important? Why does it sometimes say 0 found when I know there are results?
- Setting your language preferences and filtering out posts in other languages
- Is there a built-in language translation system on Mastodon?
- Who can see my posts? How do I send DMs?
- What can I attach to a post?
- What are custom emoji? How do I access them? Can I add new ones?
- How do I share posts?
- Can I edit my posts?
- Why can’t I quote other posts in Mastodon?
- Favourites vs. Bookmarks in Mastodon
- Customising your Mastodon interface colours
- Inviting people onto the Fediverse
- What are toots? What are boosts? What are instances? What is birdsite?
- What is the Local timeline? What is the Federated timeline?
- Transferring your Mastodon account to another server
- How to delete your account
Staying Safe
- Do I need to use my real name or real photo?
- How do I report a post? How do I report a person?
- How do I contact the person who runs my server? How do I find out what the rules are on my server?
- Blocking and muting on the Fediverse
- Restricting who can see your posts
- Restricting who can follow you
- How to hide your follows and followers
- Hiding posts from search engines
- Using Content Warnings
- Filtering your timeline
- How to prevent your account being suggested to others
- Verification works very differently on the Fediverse
- Is Mastodon end-to-end encrypted?
- Authorized Fetch
- Creating an isolated server
Accessibility
- How do I use Mastodon through a screen reader?
- How do I make posts more accessible to blind people?
- How do I make posts more accessible to deaf people?
- How do I remember to add text descriptions?
- How can Mastodon server administrators automatically remind their users to add text descriptions?
How to use Mastodon and the Fediverse: Advanced Tips
- Following hashtags
- How do I verify my account?
- Using multiple accounts
- What does the padlock mean next to people's names on Mastodon?
- Choosing a good username for the Fediverse
- I’ve written a link but it isn’t clickable. How do I make it clickable?
- Customising your notifications
- Crossposting between Mastodon and Twitter
- What are public profile pages? Why are they so useful?
- What is remote following on the Fediverse? How do I avoid it being so cumbersome?
- How do I see a post on its home server?
- How do I interact with posts that haven’t federated to my server?
- Browsing the Media tab
- Help! I’m getting notifications from a thread that I don’t want to take part in
- Hiding someone’s boosts without blocking or muting them
- How to avoid accidentally unfollowing, boosting or deleting in Mastodon
- Adjusting photo previews on Mastodon so they look nice
- Customising Mastodon polls to allow multiple selections
- Creating draft posts
- Some people seem to have much bigger character limits than me? What’s going on?
- How do I browse the Local timeline on another server?
- Switching off automatic timeline scrolling
- Don’t use dots / full stops / periods in usernames
- Someone recommended an account to follow, but when I visited it the profile was blank with no posts. Is it really blank?
- It’s a good idea to have at least some followers before posting your best content
- Why doesn’t every Fediverse server show all posts ever made by all users from all other servers?
- Using Mastodon through a keyboard
- Typing emoji through the keyboard on Mastodon
- How to activate the Mastodon Advanced Web Interface
- What is a bot account, and how do I mark my account as one?
- Embedding posts on your website
- Following accounts through RSS
- What “Follow request” really means
- Seeing the first ever posts by a Mastodon account
The Fediverse beyond Mastodon
- Mastodon API: Using Mastodon apps with non-Mastodon accounts
- BookWyrm: A social network for people who enjoy reading
- Importing your data into BookWyrm from GoodReads, LibraryThing, StoryGraph, OpenLibrary or Calibre
- Friendica: A flexible Fediverse server type with long posts
- GoToSocial: Safe and lightweight
- OwnCast: Live streaming and chat on the Fediverse
- PeerTube: Video hosting on the Fediverse
- Finding people to follow on PixelFed
- WordPress: Turning your blog into a Fediverse server
Running your own server on Mastodon and the Fediverse
- How do I create my own server?
- What do I call my server? What kind of domain name or subdomain should I use?
- Setting up a Mastodon server’s “See what’s happening” page correctly
- Using custom emoji on your server
- Recommending accounts to new users on your server
- Let me know if I’ve missed something, or if there’s something you don’t understand.
- To see the latest entries on this guide as they’re added, follow my FediTips account on the Fediverse at @feditips@mstdn.social ⧉, or if you have a newsreader you can use RSS ⧉.
Fedi.Tips – An Unofficial Guide to Mastodon and the Fediverse
An unofficial guide to using Mastodon and the Fediverse
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