So , I’ve been discovering Mastodon and I am really liking the vibe in this space . I’ve also been discovering and exploring this medium and would like to share my thoughts with fellow adapters from #India .
Mastodon instances are like alternate universes . You can have the same handle and email ID and profile information across all instances or have unique ID in each instance. It’s like how some characters stay the same in every universe but certain characters differ or don’t exist :)
I’ve found that general instances are a good base to start off with . I started with the following three :
1. Mastodon.social
2. Mstdn.social
3. Masthead.social
@dorkymcdarkface posted a master list of mastodon instances today . Find that list and go through it at your leisure to discover some instances you’d love to be a part of .
Personally , I’d recommend doing this after you’ve lurked on general instances for a few days and have a hang of how things work here
There are a lot of different apps that support Mastodon and the am primarily exploring four of them to understand how user experience varies between them and how that directs my engagement with the instance .
The first one I used was amaroq . Amaroq lets you add multiple instances and switch between instances easily . The default tab is the home feed which displays toots from the accounts you follow on the selected index .
Amaroq’s third tab is the notification tab . It’s very similar to twitter but what’s neat about it is that you can follow people right from the notification tab .
The last tab of Amaroq allows you to switch instances .
Amaroq is free and is mostly twitter like and here is a screen print for the same .
If you are on Amaroq and would like to make new friends I recommend hanging out on the local feed and then moving to the federated timeline once you have a hang of the app :)
The next app tried was Toot . The winning thing about Toot is that it allows you to checkout several instances without signing up or logging in . Toot has an add server feature that allows you to add an instance by providing its URL or searching for random instances and selecting an instance that catches your fancy . Once you select an instance , you can read the rules for that instance , add that instance to your app and browse the local feed .
If you like what you see sign up and login
Boondi