Mastodon is in the news again; huge numbers are joining after Musk bought twitter. Here are some notes on what it is, what’s the mystery, and how to join it. …

Links

  1. q=is+instances.social++any+good, instances.social is the first instance directory I found and I wanted to check it out.
  2. An instance list at instances.social/, although it also has a short quiz to help you shorten the list.
  3. https://fediverse.party/en/mastodon/, a good write up on features, philosophy and tools or
  4. https://fedi.tips/, another how to written by a fan
  5. https://docs.joinmastodon.org/, their (the code wranglers) documentation
  6. mastodon-how-to-dm-send-messages on direct messaging, on gizmodo, there’s a flag on the message.
  7. how-to-find-twitter-friends-on-mastodon/, from wired
  8. Finding twitter friends on mastodon, https://pruvisto.org/debirdify/ or https://fedifinder.glitch.me/ which also searches for user strings in your twitter follower list, both these require the mastodon user strings to be in the twitter profile
  9. There is a CLI application for Linux, called toot; it has a number of command line arguments, it seems to store the login parameters on the disk; you must login interactively the first time. It’s code is here, and web page is here, its available afaik in the raspbian repos. I asked about direct messages, and was pointed at the mastodon documentation. Here is the short cut, toot --visibility direct "@username message text".
  10. There are lots of apps to help you use it, Best Mastodon Apps download for android and 5 Best Mastodon Clients for Ubuntu and Other Linux from debug point.

Despite the exposure of the ‘federation’ functionality on the , it appears this is a developer or service engineer function. The best definition of federation I have seen is that, it’s like email, we don’t all join one email service and yet anyone with an email address can receive emails. Choosing a service/instance is a bit like choosing an email provider!

To get started just join it. Try and choose a short user name as mastodon adds the instance name to it.

I also have this page https://davelevy.info/wiki/mastodon, which has some stuff to read, and notes on virtual box.

Dave Technology , , ,

One Comment

  1. I am looking at blog-to-mastodon auto-posting, I tried activitypub which is named after the common protocol used by multiple fediverse applications. There are two problems here for me, I can’t work out how to discover the fediverse address, and they say it will not work from a subdirectory, so it’s no good for the wiki.

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