A Beginner's Guide to Mastodon — The Federated Social Network

Mastodon often gets described as "Twitter but different," and that's half true — it looks like Twitter, but the way it's built is genuinely unusual. Instead of one company running one website, Mastodon is a collection of thousands of independent servers (called "instances") that all speak the same language and connect to each other. Think of it like email: your Gmail account and a friend's Yahoo account can send messages to each other even though Gmail and Yahoo are different companies.

When you sign up for Mastodon, you first pick a server. Mastodon.social is the largest and the most common starting point, but there are servers focused on art (mastodon.art), tech (infosec.exchange, hachyderm.io), journalism (journa.host), and thousands of smaller communities. Your username looks like @yourname@servername — the server is part of your identity, like the @gmail.com part of an email.

You can still follow people on any other Mastodon server. If someone is @sarah@mastodon.art and you're on mastodon.social, you can follow her, reply to her, and she sees it — just like emailing across providers.

Mastodon shows three timelines. Home is people you follow. Local is everyone on your server (a great way to discover). Federated is everyone your server has ever seen a post from — it's firehose-like and overwhelming to most new users, safe to ignore at first.

The official Mastodon app is fine, but many people prefer third-party apps for iPhone like Ivory (from the Tweetbot makers) or Mona. Both polish the experience significantly.