Phillip Winn @pwinn@social.cleverlibre.org

@slider7420 It could be that you've done it correctly, but people aren't labeling their posts correctly. If someone properly labels their posts as Español or മലയാളം, you shouldn't see them.

You can set your own "Posting language" on the same page in preferences.

@JoeSondow The one and only way it's like email is that no matter what server you sign up with, you can "exchange messages" with anyone on any other server. If there's something else on the internet that people would be familiar with other than email, I'd love to use that analogy instead.

I've been telling people that mastodon is a mashup of Twitter, Discord, and email.

@troy My server does, but it's a customization. Mastodon itself does not.

#inspirational

#inspirational

@aazad Welcome to QOTO!

An absolutely staggering change in Apple's profits over the years, note that iPhone debuts at the top of the revenue stack in 2010, just three years after its introduction.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BJMEvKjDGmI

#nerdery #apple #video

@freemo A timeline

And of course, in between putting together the list this morning and posting it this afternoon, mastodon.world has closed to new users. So it's a list of ten good servers!

Let it not be said that I'm whinging about mastodon without offering any solutions! Even if the solution is Yet Another Explainer, I guess I'll yeet one out anyway.

*What is mastodon?* One way to think of it is as a mashup of Twitter, Discord, and email.

_Like Twitter,_ people use it primarily for microblogging. People post short blurbs of text, or photos, and follow other people doing the same.

NOTE: You need not actually sign up for mastodon to see someone's posts (assuming they're public). It is perfectly reasonable to bookmark [a favorite writer](https://mastodon.world/@joannastern) and just read.

_Unlike Twitter,_ people aren't all dependent on a single website run by a single company, owned by a single oligarch. Instead...

_Like Discord,_ people are on different "servers," or instances because we nerds don't actually speak normal English when not required to. I'm currently on fifteen (15) different Discord servers, so when I want to talk about #sudoku I switch to one of those servers, and when I want to talk about #AIart I switch to one of those servers, and so on. But...

_Unlike Discord,_ you need not actually join each of fifteen different servers. You can visit other servers, and follow people without joining the server they're on. Also, even though they use the term "servers," Discord server are all still dependent on a single company behind the scenes.

If you're familiar with Discord, you might be wondering, how does that work then? How do I go see what's going on in the world of #Mothership without visiting the Discord server dedicated to it? And that's where the email comparison comes in.

_Like email,_ you don't need to share anything with another user to communicate with them. Maybe you use one of the big ones, GMail, Yahoo!Mail, or Hotmail. Maybe you use an email address provided by the telephone company that provides your internet connection. Maybe you use a work email address. It doesn't matter, you can send and receive emails from any of the above, no problem. And yes, I'm glossing over some things there, but the point is, you pick your email service provider because of the user interface or the features or the price or because it's forced upon you or because someoone else set it up for you. It doesn't matter much.

And that's key, and confusing! When you decide you want to join mastodon, it's not like joining Twitter or joining Discord, it's more like "joining email." Because you don't actually join "email." Instead, you sign up for an email service. Chances are good that you sign up for GMail or Yahoo!Mail, because they're free and easy and well-known.

So it is with mastodon. You need to sign up for a mastodon service. Don't overthink it! If you sign up for one and later decide you wish you'd signed up for one with a cooler name or that several of your friends all ended up in one place, or you just learned there's an instance dedicated to [tabletop gaming](http://tabletop.social/) that you'd have signed up for if you'd only known, that's okay! Because...

_Unlike email,_ when you switch servers, everything comes with you! Your followers are still following you and your posts are still there.

That's enough explained for now. Mastodon isn't super-smooth everywhere, but that's part of its charm. It's also not super-toxic unless you join a toxic server. So don't do that! If you want to pick a server on your own, there are links at https://joinmastodon.org for that. But if the whole thing seems really overwhelming and confusing, let's make it easy.

I'm going to list eleven servers, all of which as accepting new signups as I write this, and all of which are "general" servers, no particular focus or specialty. You can click on each to decide which one "speaks to you" most, or you can click on one at random and just sign up! I picked these manually as good general-interest servers, and then suffled them into artbirary order using https://onlinerandomtools.com/shuffle-lines so I'm showing no favoritsm. Just pick one!

https://ohai.social/about
https://mstdn.party/about
https://c.im/about
https://home.social/about
https://universeodon.com/about
https://mas.to/about
https://mindly.social/about
https://mstdn.social/about
https://mastodon.world/about
https://mastodon.sdf.org/about
https://federate.social/about

And that's my #mastodon #explainer

@barefootstache Oh, right! I saw that qoto.org is on the hachyderm list, not sure how widespread use of that list is, nor why it's on there exactly.

Ah, mastodon.

https://github.com/hachyderm/hack/issues/8

@RileyStock You and I do not share an instance (server), and yet here I am, seeing your post!

The poorly named "Federated" feed shows you everyone (more or less) from everywhere (more or less) or you can set a favorite domain to follow and see just that. So right now I'm looking at tabletop.social posts only, even though my server is qoto.org.

@oldbie 100% agree! I asked one user how they were generating "show more/less" links on text posts, and was shocked to find out they're using content warning features for that.

It feels very "tell me you don't care about content warnings without telling me" to me.

Edits, since there is no preview feature. I said I'm at-pwinn-at-qoto.org initially, but with @-symbols in place of the "at-" strings, which mastodon helpfully rewrites and links to make the narrative look odd. In fact, I cannot figure out any way to actually include my address as text. Wrapping it in backticks didn't help.

Also, when I search for my friend's @username@server identity, it finds them. Not sure why it didn't for them in reverse!

Discoverability remains a terrible experience on #mastodon. I can give a real example of this from today:

I was texting with a friend, and they mentioned that they were on mastodon, so I said I'm @pwinn and their response was to say it is difficult to find people on mastodon. First they tried searching the web generally for me, but that didn't seem to give the result they needed.

I told them that I had learned recently that you can paste a person's URL into your mastodon search box and it automatically does the right thing, but when they tried, they didn't have my URL, so that didn't work either.

What they needed was to paste the url `https://qoto.org/@pwinn` into their mastodon search box, because mastodon knows what to do with that, but not what to do with a fully-qualified username.

This is, of course, ridiculous. I'd bring it up on HackerNews, but I have already gotten one "submit a pull request then" response there when talking about mastodon, so I'll just kvetch about it for now.

@Pat @trinsec It's annoying. I have to remember to add descriptions of skin color or ethnicity or nationality every time.

Although... I am *occasionally* surprised when trying out random genderless or ethnicity-less prompts. Just not often.

@caffeneko Ah! It does, I’m just used to seeing it for images, didn’t realize how it worked for text. Thanks!