How to Use Mastodon

Today, Bluesky (a vibe-cod­ed social media plat­form) suf­fered a near-total out­age for sev­er­al hours. Bluesky is the gen­er­al­ly-accept­ed alter­na­tive to Twit­ter (futile­ly rebrand­ed as X) after Elon Musk's pur­chase prompt­ed sev­er­al mass exo­dus­es from the plat­form. Bluesky is basi­cal­ly Twit­ter 2.0. It's a very easy switch to make because it requires you to re-exam­ine none of how you inter­act with the tech­nol­o­gy. You sim­ply make a Bluesky account, re-fol­low as many peo­ple you used to fol­low on Twit­ter as you can, and resume your scrolling activ­i­ties with­out think­ing too hard about why you had to make the switch in the first place.

What if that didn't have to be the case? What if we didn't just trade one walled gar­den for anoth­er, plac­ing our faith in rich ass­holes who man­i­fest­ly do not have our best inter­ests at heart? What if we could just opt out of the cycle of com­mu­ni­ties being built and destroyed arbi­trar­i­ly on the whims of cor­po­ra­tions, entire­ly, for­ev­er? Con­sid­er­ing how wide­ly accept­ed it is that social media has a pro­found impact on our men­tal and emo­tion­al health, are you will­ing to put in a tiny bit of effort to reclaim con­trol over that?

Step 1: Choose an Instance
Step 2: Fill Your Time­line
Step 3: Fol­low the Account
Step 4: Curate Your Expe­ri­ence

Why Use Mastodon?

Feel free to skip this long sec­tion if you're not on the fence about it.

I am, at this point, a froth­ing, rabid advo­cate for the decen­tral­ized web and self-host­ing. In my opin­ion, there is noth­ing in the his­to­ry of the web that has been more dam­ag­ing to it than the con­cen­tra­tion of all Con­tent™ on it into three to six web­sites that you spend all your time on. It has been real­ly bad for us, col­lec­tive­ly.

But I under­stand why peo­ple took that Faus­t­ian bar­gain. I under­stand why peo­ple want that con­ve­nience. It reduces fric­tion a lot! It auto­mates a dis­cov­ery process that used to be very involved and, frankly, bor­ing. It mounts a laser-focused attack on the part of our brains that enjoys instant grat­i­fi­ca­tion.

The result is that the web has become a lot less free than it used to be a few decades ago. This is not nec­es­sar­i­ly the con­se­quence of an insid­i­ous cam­paign to sup­press free expres­sion on the Inter­net. It is a nat­u­ral­ly aris­ing con­se­quence of cen­tral­iz­ing mil­lions of peo­ple onto a sin­gle plat­form: mod­er­at­ing that is real­ly dif­fi­cult and expen­sive! A sin­gle enti­ty is respon­si­ble for every­thing that mil­lions of peo­ple post in a sin­gle always-on fire­hose of con­tent.

Red­dit under­stood this chal­lenge and struc­tured itself from the begin­ning to offload that respon­si­bil­i­ty onto the users: cre­ate sub­red­dits to form com­mu­ni­ties around high­ly-spe­cif­ic top­ics which are mod­er­at­ed by mem­bers of that com­mu­ni­ty. It's not per­fect: 5 peo­ple con­sol­i­dat­ed con­trol 92 of the top 500 sub­red­dits and col­lec­tive­ly over­see 3,000 total sep­a­rate com­mu­ni­ties. Men­tion­ing this on any of those sub­red­dits will see your post removed imme­di­ate­ly. Obvi­ous­ly, you do not have any say in your com­mu­ni­ty on Red­dit either; it's still fun­da­men­tal­ly a cen­tral­ized plat­form owned by some­one else. And you can't say what­ev­er you want on it, either.

Mastodon is struc­tured some­what sim­i­lar­ly. The fed­er­at­ed net­work is sep­a­rat­ed into self-mod­er­at­ing com­mu­ni­ties. If you're old enough to remem­ber when every­body used to talk on phpBB forums, it's kind of like that; each "instance" is its own web­site, but instead of being cut off from each oth­er, the web­sites com­mu­ni­cate so that you can freely fol­low and inter­act with any oth­er par­tic­i­pat­ing web­site as though they were also on yours. The dif­fer­ence is that each web­site is oth­er­wise com­plete­ly sep­a­rate and self-con­tained. They are just all, col­lec­tive­ly, indi­vid­ual people's per­son­al web­sites.

This is a huge par­a­digm shift from Twit­ter & Bluesky's mod­el. You are not real­ly a "user of Mastodon." Mastodon is not a ser­vice. It is a piece of soft­ware, like phpBB, freely pro­vid­ed with no lia­bil­i­ty or war­ran­ty. Peo­ple use this soft­ware to cre­ate their own web­sites, and the pro­to­col links those web­sites up to each oth­er.

Being on your own web­site gives you a lot of free­dom that is sim­ply not afford­ed to you when you are post­ing on a web­site run by a big cor­po­ra­tion. That's your web­site! Post what­ev­er you want on it. Being on Twit­ter and Bluesky forces a lot of peo­ple into very euphemistic expres­sion. "Unalive your­self." "This is what c!s peo­ple think." "Sup­port me on the fun­ny orange web­site." Peo­ple con­tort them­selves so much to please the algo­rithm and avoid heavy-hand­ed auto­mat­ic mod­er­a­tion (that has no account­abil­i­ty if you fall vic­tim to its dread gaze) that it becomes its own kind of cul­ture, which is wack.

Here's some con­tro­ver­sial takes: Com­mu­ni­ties should be tend­ed by their mem­bers. They should pro­mote inter­act­ing with peo­ple and meet­ing new friends. Mod­er­a­tion should be per­son­al and nuanced, and you should have a direct and expe­di­ent line of com­mu­ni­ca­tion to the peo­ple mod­er­at­ing you. Peo­ple who don't belong to your com­mu­ni­ty should not be able to decide how you're allowed to behave.

These things may sound impos­si­ble to achieve in today's web, but they used to be the default. Actu­al­ly, it was very dif­fi­cult to imag­ine them not being the case. It was only when the grav­i­ta­tion­al pull of the Algo­rith­mic Web­site began to suck every­thing into its orbit that the alien­ation of the user from their com­mu­ni­ty became pos­si­ble. Mastodon breaks that monop­oly. You get all of the con­ve­nience of meet­ing and inter­act­ing with peo­ple on oth­er web­sites, but you keep own­er­ship of your space.

This is why decen­tral­iza­tion is impor­tant. It's not just a polit­i­cal issue, it's not a mat­ter of prin­ci­ple; it address­es an insur­mount­able, unwork­able com­po­nent of cen­tral­ized plat­forms like Bluesky, Twit­ter, Threads, etc. that cre­ate adverse incen­tives and alien­ation. Fed­er­a­tion is the com­pro­mise between hand­ing over all con­trol of your use of the Inter­net to a face­less cor­po­ra­tion, and not being able to talk to your friends because they signed up for a dif­fer­ent web­site.

It works real­ly well... if you use it cor­rect­ly. I joined Mastodon in 2018. I didn't start using it reg­u­lar­ly until around 2025. Here's what I learned.

Step 1: Choose an Instance

Peo­ple do not pay enough atten­tion to this step of the process. This is a real­ly impor­tant step. Your instance is not just "the inter­face through which you use Mastodon." You aren't sign­ing up for it like Twit­ter. You need to think of it as a com­mu­ni­ty you are join­ing. You have access to every com­mu­ni­ty on the fed­er­at­ed net­work, but this is the one you belong to. You are choos­ing who will be respon­si­ble for your expe­ri­ence on Mastodon.

Do not sign up for mastodon.social (MS). This is the first mis­take a lot of peo­ple make that will cause them to bounce off of Mastodon. MS is not a com­mu­ni­ty. You don't know any­one on MS or nec­es­sar­i­ly have any­thing in com­mon with them. MS is admin­is­tered by "@staff." @staff is not a per­son, it's a face­less account, and you can't expect it to be able to care about your Mastodon expe­ri­ence. MS is the dump­ing ground of Mastodon. If you sign up to live in the dump­ster, expect your expe­ri­ence to be trash.

Instead, decide what it is that inter­ests you. What kind of com­mu­ni­ty do you want to belong to? Are you inter­est­ed in art? Pho­tog­ra­phy? Music? Activism? Books? His­to­ry? Video games? Do you want to meet peo­ple who are phys­i­cal­ly near you? There are some covenant servers sort­ed by these cat­e­gories that you can check out. If you have any friends who use Mastodon, ask them what instance they belong to and why they chose it. Make an account on a web­site with peo­ple that you have some­thing in com­mon with. You don't need to do a ton of research; it's okay if it ends up not being a per­fect fit. You will be more eas­i­ly able to dis­cov­er new instances that might fit you bet­ter by being on Mastodon already, and you can move to them.

Try to stick to a small instance with less than a thou­sand users, espe­cial­ly if you don't know any­one else on it. If the com­mu­ni­ty is too large, you will get lost in it. My instance has around 450 users and I know the admin per­son­al­ly. I've even met her in real life; that's not nec­es­sary, but it makes me feel like I am in very capa­ble hands and I have a lot of trust in her to run things well and be con­sid­er­ate of me. I had nev­er met her before I joined Mastodon, but her account is on the front page and I inter­act­ed with her and got to know her. If I ever had an issue, I could speak to her direct­ly and advo­cate for myself. If I'm mass-report­ed by trolls, she will ignore it. I will nev­er be banned out of nowhere with no recourse.

Step 2: Fill Your Timeline

This is anoth­er major con­trib­u­tor to bounc­ing peo­ple off. When you first join, Mastodon seems dead as hell. If you're com­ing from Bluesky, it will be a jar­ring shift to turn off the algo­rith­mic fire­hose of "stuff you might like to see." A lot of people's first impres­sion will end up being, after they fol­low every­one they can find who migrat­ed with them, "okay... so what the hell do I do here?"

Mastodon is not dead. It's extreme­ly active. It just makes no effort to serve you that activ­i­ty on a sil­ver plat­ter. You're stand­ing in front of an enor­mous wall of fil­ing cab­i­nets full of stuff. It's on you to start open­ing draw­ers and rifling through them for stuff you might like to see. You only real­ly have to make a con­cert­ed effort of this once; after that, you can slow­ly expand your time­line as you use it and come across new things.

To do this, you can view peo­ple you fol­low as cura­tors for your inter­ests. Fol­low inter­est­ing peo­ple, and they'll boost inter­est­ing con­tent to your time­line; then, you can fol­low who­ev­er post­ed that con­tent, and so on, grow­ing your net­work. Try to pri­or­i­tize peo­ple who are active so that your home feed feels live­ly. I don't rec­om­mend fol­low­ing bots, at least at first; they are bor­ing and can crowd out actu­al con­tent if they post too often.

But how do you find inter­est­ing peo­ple? There's sev­er­al options; let's start with Trend­ing. This is the most direct­ly anal­o­gous to a FYP (For You page). It high­lights posts, hash­tags, and peo­ple with­in the last week that have been inter­act­ed with more than oth­ers. Scav­enge it every so often for inter­est­ing peo­ple and fol­low them. This will be more effec­tive if you're on an instance for your inter­ests (as rec­om­mend­ed in Step 1) because every­body else there will be help­ing to curate it for you by inter­act­ing with stuff you might like to see.

Next there's the Live feeds. Trawl­ing the "This serv­er" feed can feel a tad awk­ward, because it's full of peo­ple you don't know post­ing about stuff you might not care about. It's still your best resource for find­ing peo­ple with shared inter­ests because they are on the same instance as you, so they have some­thing in com­mon with you. Look for inter­est­ing peo­ple and fol­low them. You can also check "Oth­er servers"," and even "All," but they are like­ly to be most­ly trash, espe­cial­ly on larg­er or more gen­er­al-inter­est servers.

Hash­tags are alive and well on Mastodon. Since there is no algo­rithm, there is no reward or pun­ish­ment for using them. Most peo­ple don't, so they are pret­ty emp­ty, but you can find ones that do have some activ­i­ty and fol­low them.

You can also go through the fol­low­ing lists of peo­ple you already fol­low and see if any accounts on there are both active and con­sis­tent­ly inter­est­ing to you. Mastodon also has a but­ton to "Fea­ture on pro­file" which adds things to your Fea­tured tab, so you can high­light accounts and things that you like. Don't for­get to check that tab out when you look at someone's pro­file.

By doing this you should be able to cre­ate a basic trick­le of con­tent across your home feed. Give peo­ple a chance. You can always unfol­low them if they get annoy­ing.

Step 3: Follow the Account

Now that you have some activ­i­ty on your time­line to occu­py your­self with, let's

Wait.

Hold on a sec­ond. What exact­ly is "social media," any­way? What's the point? Why are you even on one? Why do you need a Mastodon account, or Bluesky, or what­ev­er else?

Why do you scroll?

Is it just so that you have some­thing to do? Are you fill­ing time while you're bored? Why is it called "social media," then? What's social about it? Is it just that it's cre­at­ed by lots of ran­dom peo­ple all over the world, instead of the com­pa­ny that owns the plat­form? Social­ized media?

Twit­ter and Bluesky have defin­i­tive hier­ar­chies now. It didn't used to be like this, but through the pow­er of the Algo­rithm, peo­ple have self-sort­ed into Con­tent™ Cre­ators and Con­tent™ Con­sumers (also known as Reply Guys). The peo­ple who cre­ate Con­tent™ make posts, and the peo­ple who con­sume it look at them, like them, and maybe boost them if they like them a lot.

These plat­forms, as any­one who's been on them for a while can tell you, are about chas­ing clout. Clout = atten­tion. It means lots of fol­low­ers, which means lots of likes on your posts, which means you also have influ­ence to put oth­er things you care about on people's feeds. This addic­tive num­bers-game dri­ves engage­ment with the plat­form. Fol­low­ers are (for the most part) not your friends, or even your oomfs. They are a cap­tive audi­ence.

I promise I'm arriv­ing at a point here.

On the oth­er hand, if you are just con­sum­ing, the algo­rithm ensures that you nev­er have a short­age of stuff to look at. Every­thing you like, boost, reply to, click on, vis­it the pro­file that post­ed, or just linger on a lit­tle too long gets logged and used to adjust weights and pul­leys in the vast machine that vom­its more Con­tent™ in front of you. Enjoy.¹

What's social about either of these things, exact­ly? Nei­ther role in that dynam­ic is engag­ing with the oth­er as human beings. To a cre­ator, fol­low­ers are just a num­ber that makes oth­er num­bers high­er, so you can feel good when you make a post and watch the num­bers go up. To a con­sumer, cre­ators are just Con­tent™ on an end­less plain of "stuff I might like to see." A post is just enter­tain­ment. Boost­ing a post is a self­ish action, to enjoy your share of the noti­fi­ca­tions it gen­er­ates.

There are moments of human­i­ty there, but they are the excep­tion, not the rule. These aren't places you're intend­ed to meet or com­mu­ni­cate with peo­ple. You use Dis­cord for that, or maybe some­thing else because it sucks now. It's anti­so­cial media: it active­ly encour­ages you not to care about any­one else on it. This is not sus­tain­able or desir­able.

Mastodon infa­mous­ly has no algo­rithm, so it is not keep­ing tabs on what you engage with. It does not reward chas­ing clout, because it does not have the Cre­ator-Con­sumer hier­ar­chy. If you boost a post, you get noth­ing. All noti­fi­ca­tions go to the orig­i­nal poster and the post itself is unaf­fect­ed. You can­not see people's favorites, or how many favorites are on a post, so favorit­ing posts also gets you noth­ing. You could just book­mark them if you want­ed to cat­a­logue them. None of the but­tons and knobs and dials in front of you are real­ly hooked up to any­thing.

So why have them at all? You favorite a post to send a word­less noti­fi­ca­tion to the per­son who made it. The mes­sage is more or less that you had a pos­i­tive reac­tion to what they post­ed. It serves no oth­er pur­pose what­so­ev­er but to cre­ate a small moment of inter­ac­tion with the per­son who made the post.

You boost a post so that peo­ple who fol­low you can see it. This is the pri­ma­ry and prac­ti­cal­ly only way that posts spread across the fedi­verse, so it's real­ly a neigh­bor­ly thing to do. Take that person's art and put it up on the fridge for the whole house­hold to see! You don't get any pats on the back for it. Just do it because you want it on your pro­file.

And if you do boost someone's post, make sure you fol­low the account. Mastodon will not take note that you boost­ed them and dan­gle them in front of you lat­er. You need to get in the habit of fol­low­ing ran­dom peo­ple who inter­est you for even a fleet­ing moment. There are no Con­tent™ Cre­ators in this ecosys­tem. This is proso­cial media; it rewards you for mak­ing con­nec­tions.

Which leads me to this: You reply to a post because you have some­thing to say. On Twit­ter and Bluesky, reply­ing to a post feeds the algo­rithm and increas­es a num­ber. On Mastodon, it posts a pub­lic mes­sage in a thread and that's it. It's a way to talk to peo­ple, and that is 90% of what you're here to do. If you're look­ing for the noti­fi­ca­tion dopamine hit, the best way to get it is to reply to a post with your thoughts. Peo­ple will favorite your reply. They will boost your reply. They will fol­low you because they liked your reply. Reply to things. Be social.

So why do you scroll? What is social media? Ide­al­ly, it's a way to con­nect with peo­ple you don't know that well. It's a way to find out about new things, meet new peo­ple, com­mu­ni­cate about shared inter­ests, and express your­self. Mastodon was designed from the ground up around this prin­ci­ple, and if you refuse to abide by it, it will not click with you. This has bounced off a lot of peo­ple who don't "get" it because they are accus­tomed to anti­so­cial media. Reply to peo­ple, fol­low their accounts, boost their posts. Build com­mu­ni­ty.

Step 4: Curate Your Experience

The final most com­mon thing that bounces peo­ple off of Mastodon is the cul­ture, such as it is. I have seen a lot of peo­ple com­plain that they tried out Mastodon and got ran off of it by the kind of peo­ple who use Mastodon. Social media where the pri­ma­ry method of inter­act­ing with peo­ple is reply­ing to them caus­es a lot of fric­tion with peo­ple com­ing off of anti­so­cial media, where reply­ing to some­one is often looked down upon. Who are you and why should I care?

I get it, I hon­est­ly do. Free, open-source, decen­tral­ized, fed­er­at­ed soft­ware first and fore­most attracts the kind of peo­ple who are specif­i­cal­ly seek­ing that out. If you need­ed to read this to use it, you are almost cer­tain­ly not that kind of per­son. And that's okay!

That kind of per­son almost cer­tain­ly has some deeply-held prin­ci­ples that they are pas­sion­ate about. Mastodon being a proso­cial net­work, they are incen­tivized to share them. It's kind of the whole point. And they out­num­ber you, because they were there first.

That said, I'll just be frank: if this is a seri­ous prob­lem for you, you prob­a­bly didn't fol­low step 1. You prob­a­bly joined mastodon.social, and what did I say about sign­ing up to live in the dump­ster? If you are a mem­ber of a small instance, your sur­face area with the rest of the fedi­verse is con­sid­er­ably reduced. I have nev­er had any­one come knock­ing on my noti­fi­ca­tions unprompt­ed to demand that I tag some type of con­tent with a warn­ing or add alt text to my posts (though I also just add alt text to every post, because it doesn't take that long and the inter­face bugs you about it) or to argue with me about some­thing.

It's not too late, just move to a small­er instance. Yes, Mastodon's migra­tion tools are not ide­al and it sucks to leave all your posts behind. It's worth it, trust me. The entire mod­el is based on you want­i­ng to be on the web­site you're on, and it does not work if you don't care about your instance. That's your web­site!

What­ev­er instance you are on should prob­a­bly at least silence mastodon.social. Yes, this kind of runs counter to the idea of a fed­er­at­ed net­work, but MS can­not rea­son­ably be expect­ed to han­dle its mod­er­a­tion bur­den and users of MS can­not rea­son­ably be expect­ed to have any con­nec­tion to their instance. You can still inter­act with select peo­ple on MS if it's silenced, it just removes it from the fed­er­at­ed time­line and shunts any inter­ac­tions with peo­ple on it into a sep­a­rate menu that doesn't alert you. This will cut out most of the noise.

This is where you need to have a per­son­al rela­tion­ship with your instance admin. They are respon­si­ble for mod­er­at­ing not just the mem­bers of the instance but which instances get to fed­er­ate with you. They can silence spam instances and sus­pend ones that are full of trolls or gross stuff. They can reach out to instances with prob­lem users and get action tak­en. They pro­tect you from harass­ment and retal­i­a­tion.

If you do have at least a pass­ing acquain­tance with your admin, and peo­ple are has­sling you in your noti­fi­ca­tions about some­thing...

Block!

There are no con­se­quences for ignor­ing these replies. No one can force you to do any­thing on Mastodon except your instance admin. Block them and you will nev­er show up in their feed ever again; as far as their instance is con­cerned, you've nev­er post­ed any­thing and nev­er will. Peo­ple out­side your com­mu­ni­ty have no right to tell you what to do, and no abil­i­ty besides.

As long as you belong in your com­mu­ni­ty, noth­ing else mat­ters. You can fol­low any­one you want and post any­thing you want. You have an incred­i­ble degree of free­dom over how your posts are spread and who they're vis­i­ble to. If you want to click past that pop-up ask­ing you to put alt text on an image, I think you're kind of a chode, but nobody can stop you! And any­body who tries, you can just get rid of if you real­ly don't want to lis­ten to them.

That cura­tion, the cul­ti­va­tion of an expe­ri­ence you enjoy, is on you, not Mastodon. No machine is doing the work for you, but you also have total con­trol.

Afterword

When I first joined, I under­stood none of this and didn't real­ly get why the peo­ple who did talk about them felt so strong­ly about them. I strug­gled to make Mastodon work for me despite being very pas­sion­ate about the tech­nol­o­gy. Now, eight years lat­er and final­ly able to use Mastodon as my pri­ma­ry feed, all the pieces have clicked into place for me, and I under­stand per­son­al­ly the argu­ments I used to see peo­ple hav­ing about these top­ics.

Even if you don't care about com­mu­ni­ty or cen­sor­ship or proso­cial behav­ior or any of that crap, even if you could give a rat's ass about the cor­po­rate con­sol­i­da­tion of the Inter­net or walled gar­dens, I promise you that you can still enjoy Mastodon. You can still get out of it what you're look­ing for, but you have to use it on its own terms. Mastodon is not a web­site. Mastodon is soft­ware that can be used to run a web­site. Decide what kind of web­site you want to be on and use Mastodon to make it hap­pen.

If you think Mastodon isn't for you, it just hasn't clicked for you yet. That's like say­ing web brows­ing isn't for you. The Inter­net isn't for you. Telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions isn't for you. There is no one that Mastodon "isn't for." You just need to make it yours.

If you're still hav­ing trou­ble using Mastodon, fol­low me @tael@yiff.life and reply to my posts.

1. This is why doom­scrolling is a thing. Posts that make you mad arrest your atten­tion. Reply­ing to a post has way more weight in the algo­rithm than lik­ing it. You inter­act with con­tent you hate or that makes you upset or afraid, so the algo­rithm serves you more of it. Bon appétit! ↩︎