What does it mean that Mastodon is open source? Anyone can download, modify and install Mastodon on their own server — plus, the developers of the platform don’t own the copyright. That doesn’t mean that you can grab Mastodon’s code without acknowledging the source, though. Former President Donald Trump’s social media platform, Truth Social, initially launched with Mastodon code and passed it off as if it were original software. Mastodon did not take kindly to that. How do you create a Mastodon account? When you arrive on the Mastodon website, you can click a button called “create account,” which directs you to a page listing servers to choose from. You can filter these by various factors, like region, language, topic, sign-up speed and more. There, find a server that piques your interest and join — if it’s a server that requires you to be approved, you might need to wait a bit. From there, you can start finding people to follow, regardless of whether they’re registered via your same server. In effort to minimize confusion on new users picking a server, Mastodon made changes amid the “Twitter exodus” so that it would easier to create an account. Now, when you go to sign up, it will give an easy option to create an account on mastodon.social instead of choosing a server. How do you decide which Mastodon server to join? Mastodon’s website has helpful resources — but it’s still a bit overwhelming and challenging to find a home base that aligns with your interests. Ask friends who are already on Mastodon if they have suggestions! Or just join somewhere random, because you can always change your server affiliation later once you get into the swing of things. Can you talk to people on other Mastodon servers besides your own? Yes, you can follow people outside of your local server and reply to their posts. However, when you want to follow someone on a different server, you have to enter their username in the search box on your server to find them first, then follow them. You can’t just go to their profile and click the follow button as you would on Twitter. What’s the difference between the Home, Local and Federated timelines? Your Home timeline shows you posts from people that you follow, similar to Twitter. The Local timeline shows posts from all users in your server, while the Federated timeline shows you all public posts from users that people in your server follow. (Hint: You can turn on “Slow Mode” in Preferences –> Appearance to hide timeline updates behind a click if things are coming at you too fast!) What is Mastodon’s moderation policy? Individual server admins set their own moderation policies, so you should read the policy on the server you choose to ensure it matches up with your values. What are the drawbacks of Mastodon when compared with Twitter/X? Mastodon’s user base is a fraction of a percentage of the size of Twitter’s user base. It’s also far less intuitive to navigate, since it hasn’t been designed for a massive global audience like Twitter. That could change in time as more developers join the project in the wake of the Twitter takeover. What are the benefits of Mastodon compared with Twitter/X? Well, for one thing, Mastodon is not owned by Elon Musk… however, it’s going to be difficult in the near-term for Mastodon to replicate the same “watercooler of the world” vibe that Twitter was defined by. Some users might prefer Mastodon to X, though, as it’s more customizable by nature. Unlike X, individual communities have different content guidelines, which provide a variety of different user experiences. And while the user base on Mastodon is smaller, this can lead to more personal and direct conversations, at times, compared with tweeting into the void, so to speak. Is Mastodon safer than Twitter? Mastodon is what you make of it. Due to its decentralized nature, if you are looking for a more controlled online experience, you can join a server with stricter guardrails against harassment. Some Mastodon features are also built with mitigating harassment in mind. For example, you can only search by hashtag, not by words that appear in a toot. So if you want your post to be discoverable, you can tag it — if you’d rather limit the audience, no one can find your tweet about the Red Sox by simply searching “red sox” if you haven’t tagged it. However, a text-based search can surface the posts you’ve written, favorited, boosted or have been mentioned in, which can be useful. Can I post images and video? As noted above, Mastodon supports many Twitter conventions, but its support for media is more limited. Where Twitter supports a variety of media and other data appended to tweets, including its audio-only social “Spaces,” plus photos, video, GIFs, polls, precise location and experimental “Status” tags, Mastodon simply supports images, videos, audio and polls. You can add up to four images to a post, up to eight megabytes in size. Video and audio can be any length, but with a file size limit of 40 megabytes. Can I post privately to friends? Mastodon offers the ability to set your post’s privacy at the time of writing. Posts can be set to be public to be visible by all; unlisted to make them public but opted out of discovery features; only visible to your followers; or only visible to those users you’ve mentioned. Can I get verified on Mastodon? No. There’s no universal verification system like on Twitter. Some servers may vet their user sign-ups and you can self-verify, in a way, by adding links to your Mastodon profile that have a specific attribute (rel=”me”) in order to prove you are who you say you are. Some servers are having fun with the idea of verification in a less-than-official fashion. For example, the mstdn.social server lets you add blue-and-white checkmarks and other emoji to your display name if you’d like, which make you look verified, even though these don’t mean anything. (Sort of like Twitter’s new verification system! But for free!) Image Credits: @stux@mstdn.social