I just set up an account. Didn’t you have a post about how to use Mastadon? It’s a little confusing.
– Michael Julius 2019-08-28 10:24 UTC
I did write 2017-11-16 How to Mastodon. These days I’m not so sure it’s still good. Instead, I see Joyeuse Noëlle’s An Increasingly Less-Brief Guide to Mastodon getting recommended a lot.
– Alex Schroeder 2019-08-28 10:56 UTC
Once you created an account, you can log into that account using different clients.
These might offer a more pleasing experience, depending on your needs. I like Mastodon as it is but I was also a TweetDeck user.
– Alex Schroeder 2019-08-28 10:58 UTC
I think these days new accounts come with the “Enable advanced web interface” setting unchecked, so you get the single column layout. Let me think of the things that seem non-obvious to me:
- search is often limited to hashtags in public posts on your server only!
- thus, use hashtags every now and then so other people can find your posts
- you can also search for accounts from other server: search for kensanata to find my various accounts and click on the “person plus” icon in order to follow me
- sometimes clicking on an account from another server shows you that they have written posts but don’t show any of them: that’s because they haven’t been downloaded to your server, yet – if you follow them, their posts will get downloaded
- clicking on the avatar on their profile takes you to their profile on their server: now you can see their public posts but since you are on their server, you can no longer favor their posts nor follow them unless you log in again
- Home is for the posts of people you follow
- Notifications is for posts that mention you or people favoring (liking) or boosting (sharing) your posts
- Local is for posts from people on the same server as you
- Federated is for posts on the same server as you, even if written by people not on your server: mostly posts from people somebody on your server is already following
- clicking on a post shows you all it’s ancestors (no branches) and all its descendants (including all the branches)

– Alex Schroeder 2019-08-28 11:43 UTC
I’m going to copy this to a new page. This advice isn’t is bad!
– Alex Schroeder 2019-08-29 06:10 UTC