Bird born in '97 from Down Under (Africa Edition (I'm talking about South Africa))


So I'm trying to piece together what Mastodon is, and I this is what I think it is so far:

Mastodon is like Reddit, in that there are separate servers like subreddits. Unlike Reddit, you have to join those "subreddits" with a new created account each time, so you need multiple accounts across different communities. This is why Mastodon says they're decentralised: none of the communities are connected to each other barring the framework of Mastodon itself. Mastodon "subreddits" are then like Twitter, in that there's a bunch of people "tweeting" (I think they call them tooting... I don't like that name) on their accounts that you can follow individually. Like Reddit, you can see the latest "tweets" of the entire "sub" which on bigger communities is very much a blur.

I feel like I need to expand my online presence to more socials, and maybe this will either help people figure out what Mastodon actually is or make people correct me on what it actually is.


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in reply to @PreschoolKaiju's post:

It's kind of a mix of everything. The "subreddits"/servers of reddit and Discord, and the posts and feed of Twitter. Once all set up it acts a lot like Twitter with a "newest first" feed, "retweets", favourites, notifications, comments... It's also very nice to be able to filter away "retweets" and replies from the feed :3

You can follow people on other instances and have a feed with content from across the whole fediverse so you only need one account really. Unless you want to separate them into a bab account and a non-bab account for example.

The hard part is actually figuring out where to start and which instance to sign up at; the "subreddit" you feel the most welcome at (and have a localized feed for). Because a couple of instances have signups disabled or they're invite only. It's also kind of a hassle if you want to move the account somewhere else, but it's entirely doable and you get to keep your followers (but not the ones you follow).

(I also suggest using a third-party app where you can change the name of the button to publish a post to whatever you want :3)