alekyHello everybody. Alexis from Thessaloniki here. It is nice that we have our "own" social media platform.
Aral Balkan@aleky Welcome, Alexis :) And thank you for the kind words. Looking forward to chatting :)
@aral Hey Aral, I would like to ask you to make an.. introduction on what mastodon is and how can it be used. e.g. what is an instance, can we participate in more than one? what is local and federated timeline, home and notifications. when you push reply does this message go only to the person you reply to (home or notifications) or does it go to a local timeline? Can you see your followers and the people you follow? I have never used twitter and other social media so I could use some help.
@aleky Hey, sure. I did attempt to a few days ago. Check out the #mastodon hashtag and see if those help.
(Hashtags are a good way of grouping topics.)
Please let me know if those help and if you have any other questions. Once we have a forum we can easily post on, I’d love to gather that information into a proper long-form post.
@aral & @b3yond #mastodon
So the d25.community is an instance,right? Like a group? Can I create one? I am thinking maybe one like d25.thessaloniki. Would that (and its touts) be available to anyone? anyone that followes me?
Well, probably, an option would be to inform all Thessaloniki diem-ers to sign up in d25.community and write comments including hashtag-thessaloniki. But this way all comments would be public, right?
Also what about boost? like forward the boosted message to my followers?
@aleky @b3yond An instance is like a Twitter that the person/group/organisation that set it up owns and controls. Because they’re federated, people on different instances can follow and talk to each other. You can see posts from people on other instances that people here are following on the federated timeline.
The more instances, the better for the network.
Boosting a post gives it greater visibility in your network.
@b3yond @aleky One important point is that there's no privacy in Mastodon, only visibility.
Approach it as a public network and the “privacy settings” as visibility suggestions. Your toots may federate to instances that aren’t even running Mastodon and don’t honour visibility settings (e.g., your “direct message” may appear on their public timeline).
For private communication, use Signal, Tox.chat, etc.
@aral thank you very very much for your answers and sorry for my late responce. Do you need your own server to create your own instance? Could that be a simple - old pc server? I will also check the privacy settings. Could you set different settings on different instances?
b3yond@aleky @aral I'm not sure how many settings there are. some instances (like cybre.space) modified the mastodon source code very much. others, like this one, just copied it.
The easiest (and cheap) way to set up an instance is probably showed here: https://digitalmind.io/post/deploying-mastodon-on-digital-ocean