Hello world, Nelson here. Today we’re going to take a look at how you can get started with Mastodon. Mastodon is a collection of social networking sites, just like Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn, but with a key difference. Rather than being run by any single company, it is run by many communities and organizations. We’ll show you how to join a server, find your people, and understand the quirks of social media owned by no one. Let’s get started by choosing a server. To choose a community server, just head to the following website. Please click on the card above or the link in the description. Now we’re going to click on the Create an Account button. Here we are on the official list of servers that connect to the Mastodon network. There are over 10,000 servers serving over 1.2 million users, but don’t worry too much about picking the perfect one to start with. Switching servers is easy. Choose any server to get your bearings and see it as a base camp for exploring the communities on Mastodon. Now I’m going to help the Kevin Cookie Company create a Mastodon account, and cookies are perishable goods that taste better when they haven’t been shipped too far. So, I’m going to look for a regional server, and I’m going to filter by regional servers in North America. And sure enough, there’s a Pacific Northwest community server called pnw.zone that sounds perfect for the Kevin Cookie Company, so I’m going to create an account there. Every server has its own ground rules. Different servers have different approaches to moderation and preventing harassment, so in the long run, which server you choose may have a large effect on your experience on Mastodon. But for now, we’re just going to double-check that none of these rules ban what we want to do with the server, and it looks okay for us to make an account for the Kevin Cookie Company here, so I’m going to click Accept. Here you can choose your display name, username, and an e-mail address to connect the account with. I’m going to fill this out real quick. I’ve chosen a password. My initial information is all filled out, so I’m going to click Sign Up. A message with a confirmation link has been sent to my e-mail address, so I’ll go into my e-mail client and click that to activate my account. Once you click the link in your verification e-mail, you’ll arrive at this screen, which suggests accounts you can follow. I’m going to follow a few accounts, and then I’m going to scroll down and click Done. It says your home feed is being prepared, and then we see some nice posts. Now that you have a Mastodon account, if you want to use Mastodon on your phone, you can put that account into one of many apps listed on the official Mastodon website. I particularly like Tusky for Android and Ice Cubes for iOS, but there is no shortage of options. For this video, however, we will stick with the web interface, which also works perfectly well as a website on your phone. Now let’s explore all of the feeds or timelines that allow you different views into the Fediverse. Right now, we’re on the home timeline, which shows you just the people that you’ve subscribed to. Now, I’ve only subscribed to this cute dog and an account that gives you tips on how to use Mastodon, so this is pretty quiet right now. The Explore tab shows you posts, hashtags, and news stories that are popular across the Fediverse in a curated view. Your local timeline is posts that are only on your server, which, since this is Pacific Northwest server, includes a lot of pictures of pine trees and bike lanes. The federated view is all of the posts on every server that your server knows about, so this can scroll by pretty quickly. Pretty busy. Now, before we follow anyone else, note that some people may be put off by a mysterious blank profile following them, so let’s edit our profile to make sure people know who we are. Here you can write a bit about yourself in your bio, add an avatar, and a header image. Note that our full handle is our username, KevinCookieCo, at our server name, pnw.zone. That’s important if you want people from other servers to follow you. Now I’m going to fill this out real quick. There, now I’ve filled out my profile, and I’m going to click Save Changes. It says, Changes successfully saved, so I’m going to go back to Mastodon and look at my profile. Now, suppose you want to invite your friends to Mastodon. You can click on Invite People down here or go into Preferences and scroll down to Invite People. Here you can generate a link to send to your friends that will sign them up on the same server that you’re using. You can set a limit on the number of uses that the link can have and how long the link will work for. Since I’m going to invite my friend Kevin sometime today, I’m going to generate this invite link. And now I can copy it and send it to him through text or whatever, maybe Signal. So, inviting people you know to Mastodon is one way to make Mastodon friends. How else can you find people to follow? Well, if you can export a list of people you follow on Twitter who also have Mastodon accounts, then you can import that list here. We’ll link to a Twitter export site in the description, since it might be blocked by the time this video goes up. But if you are able to export, then you will be able to upload your following list to Mastodon right here. Another way to find people to follow is through hashtags. So, if you search for a hashtag in the search bar or discover a hashtag that you like in the Explorer window, let’s say travel photography, you’ll see all sorts of people posting about travel photography with the travel photography hashtag. And you could follow those individual people or you could follow the hashtag right up here. See follow hashtag, then any time anyone posts using the travel photography hashtag, it’ll show up in your home timeline from now on. Another way that you can find people to follow is the profiles directory. You can see the small link down here that will take you to a list of people who want to be found. You can sort by recently active or new arrivals like you. You can narrow it down to only the server that you’re on or from everywhere that your server knows about. There’s also a list of recommended accounts in the Explorer tab under For You. This is the same list of people that you would have seen when you first signed up. If you’re on a smaller server like this one, you should definitely check out the local timeline for people that you might want to follow who share your interests that made you join the server in the first place. Finally, one tried and true method for finding people to follow is to see who someone you like is following. I’m going to search for my personal account. If you know the username of the person you’re looking for is pretty easy, here I am, Nelson. I’m going to look at my profile and scroll down to see who I’m following. Now if you scroll down again, you’ll see that my personal account is following Curtis Bray, who turns out to be the admin of pnw.zone, the server that we’re on. So, he seems like a good guy to follow. Let’s give him a follow. Now I’m going to post our first toot to introduce Kevin Cookie Company to the Fediverse. I have a few options here. I can add an image. I can add a poll to help people make my decisions for me. I can change the post privacy. Now this is important. So, there are four privacy levels. Public means everyone can see it. Unlisted means anyone can see it if they can find it. It’s not promoted in the local timeline or other discovery features. Followers only means that only people who follow me can see it, but it’s not very useful if you don’t lock your account so that people have to request to follow you. And then mention people only is a DM. This is Mastodon’s equivalent of direct messages, and it means that when you mention someone, like let’s say my username, this message will only go to them and other people who you have at mentioned in this conversation. But be careful because if you try to talk about someone behind their back and you include their username, you’re actually talking to their face. It’s not private in that case. So be careful. I’m going to choose unlisted because I want to do a soft launch of the Kevin Cookie Company on the Fediverse. And then there’s content warnings, which allow you to hide things like cookie spoilers, people who want to have a nice surprise when they eat the cookie and don’t want to know about it ahead of time. And then you can change the language. If you write in multiple languages, this is very useful. And you can add emojis, including custom emojis that your server might have. I’ll write our introductory post in this text box. It’s going to go on our timeline when I hit publish. Now let’s go check out that toot on our profile. If you look at this post, there are several buttons that allow you to interact with the post. First, there is the reply button, which would let you create a thread about cookies. There’s also the boost button, which anyone who follows me will see my boosted messages. If I boost the same thing again, it appears in their timeline again. If I favorite a post, that’s a message to the person who posted it that I liked their post. It’s semi-public. But this bookmark feature lets me save a post privately, which no one else can see that I’ve done that. Then there’s a share function, which would let you post this post to other services. And then there’s the ellipsis, which has various options. I’ll note you can edit your post here or delete it. Finally, let’s talk about notifications. Here are notifications that you may receive. Some people have followed me, including my personal account. Also, there would be at mentions if people had mentioned you either publicly in a thread or privately through direct messages, those would appear here. There you have it. Now you’re free from Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, or whoever the annoying billionaire of the week is because Mastodon is not for sale. If you want to see more videos like this, please consider subscribing. And I’ll see you in the Fediverse.