Welcome to all the people from India that are joining Mastodon in these days!!

#india #introductions and #followindia can be helpful hashtags to find other people just arrived here like you.

We understand that you are still unconfident with this platform, therefore here you will find some helpful tips to better understand how #Mastodon works:

- There is no such thing as "A" social network called Mastodon! Instead there are thousands of independent social networks called Mastodon Instances.
- Every Instance has his own server, community, rules, admins and moderation.
- Every Instance can interact with users that are on other Instances, exactly like email works (you can send an email from gmail to yahoo, right?).
- Every Instance can choose to silence or completely block another Instance (i.e. because permits bad behaviour)

On Mastodon you have 3 different timelines:

HOME - Like Twitter, shows all the posts of the people you follow

LOCAL - Shows all the posts of the members of your Instance

FEDERATED - Shows all the posts of the people that you follow and also the posts of people on other Instances that are followed by people of your Instance

The Instance you choose is very Important and depending on it your experience on Mastodon, the people you will see and the community talk will be very different.

On https://instances.social/ you can easily search instances based on language, interests and some badic policies. The suggestions about Instances on this website are more detailed and precise than the ones on joinmastodon.org

mastodon.social is one of the biggest Mastodon Instances. It's the instance created and run by the creator of Mastodon but it's not to be considered the 'official' Mastodon Instance because every single Mastodon Instance has equal power to the others.

The optimal strategy for Mastodon is not to rely on a bunch of gigantic Instances but on thousands of local Instances.

Try to imagine to have at least one Instance for every city, town, school or workplace, with a LOCAL timeline and a FEDERATED one.

Thousand of Instances all connected together and wiyh the possibility to share informations snd block the ones that permits trolling, harrassnent or bad behaviour but giving to every single Instance the freedom to decide how to act.

You can register yourself on multiple Instances and try yo see the difference between them.

Anyway, after some exolorations, most of tbe people prefer to stay on one single Instance that they will choose as their base (it's somehow like trying different telephone companies and then choosing one, but with the difference that in this case an Instance is not only a service provider but also a community made of people, with his own culture and rules).

If you want to change Instance is possible to transfer to the new one all your contacts and followers. This is only available if both the new and the old Instance run the latest version of Mastodon's software

There is no official App for Mastodon.

Instead there are many different Apps.

(Also here the similarities with email are helpful: there is no 'official email App', right?)

The most famous Apps for Android are:
- Tusky
- Fedilab

The most famous App fir iOS are:
- Amaroq
- Toot

Every App has is pros. and cons.
Some are free and some not.
Some are also on F-Droid, the open source 'store' fir Android.

Check out which one you find the best for your taste.

- Actually if you search something in the search box of Mastodon, it will find only users or #hashtags

- There is no function like 'retweet and comment'. That's by design, because is a kind of function that is mostly used to harrass people. Yes, I know, it's also useful for legit uses but, well, the point here is to prefer real interactions than boosts.

- There is also no Trending Topics and that's also by design. This confuses most of the Twitter users 😁. In fact, by removing it, Mastodon killed the urge to enhance CERTAIN arguments instead of others and all the 'social noise' about vapor-problems. Mastodon is a place where you can TALK with people without having to know by a TT board that a certain argomrnt is more important than the one you want to talk.

On every timeline ( HOME, LOCAL and FEDERATED) the posts are shown in chronological order.

This means that no algorythm, number of stars or other factors will influence the number of times you will see a post.

A post can be boosted ('retweeted') but that's it.

When you check a profile of another user you will see the number of people who follows his and who are followed by him but if you click on.that number you can't see the entire list of people. Instead you can only see the ones of them that you just know.

That's alsi by design and that's also an anti-harrassment tool.

Let's check real life: in real life I dont walk around with the list of my friends attached on my neck and neither of you (hopefully) does.

So, if you cannot discover new people by checking who is following who, how can you find and meet new people on Mastodon?

By t-a-l-k-i-n-g, socializing and discuss things. If you boost a post of your friend you are presenting him to all your other friends and so on.

Mastodon emphasizes real human socialization instead of espionnage-style exploration of profiles

Another thing about the importance of choosing the right Instance for you: I am quite unaware of indian politics, I'm not expert in indian culture and languages and apart some Bollywood movies, I know quite nothing about indian pop culture. And also maby moderators and Instance admins.

If you registered yourself on an a Mastodon Instance run by peoole that is unaware of what you are talking about can lead to problems. If I had to moderate users that are making reference to things that I dont know in.languages that I dont speak, well... you can imagine. 🙃

(I place here the hashtags #instructions and #help to make this thread viewable to who is searching them)

All the Mastodon Instances that together form the entire 'Mastodon Galaxy' are part of something much bigger called the #Fediverse.

Apart of Mastodon there are many other free platforms. Some of them, like #Pleroma or #Misskey are also similsr to Twitter but others are very diffetent.

#PixelFed is similar to Instagram
#PeerTube is similar to Youtube
#Friendica is similar to Facebook
#FunkWhale is sumilar ti Soundcloud
#Writely and #Plume are blogging platforms
#Hubzilla is a powerful.multi-functional platform
And there are more...

All of them, like Mastodon don't have a unique central server but are a 'Galaxy' of many Instances.

You can choose between different PixelFed Instances and so on...

But ALL these platforms ('Galaxies') interact with each other forming the Fediverse.

What does that mean?

>>>

>>> Imagine tat you can natively receive on Twitter also Facebook statuses. Or decide to follow on Facebook a user that doesn't have Facebook but only a Tumblr account. Or watching on Twitter a video posted on YouTube and comment it with a tweet without keaving Twitter.

Well, that's what the Fediverse is! You have an account on Pixelfed? Ok. I don't use Pixelfed but I can follow you from Mastodon.

A friend of mine does't like Mastodon but prefers the more Facebook-ish Friendica? No problem: he can follow me from Friencica and we can both chat and interact staying each one on the platform that we prefer.

Mastodon is not Twitter
BUT THIS ALONE WILL NOT HELP...
...if you are still tangled in a Twitter-mindset!!

Are you still searching for the Trending Topics that will impose to everyone what is the thing about whom you "must" talk today?

Are you searching for "people to follow" instead of "people to interact with"?

Are you still planning time wasting things like hashtag wars instead of doing something real?

Are you searching for emotional and social gratifications by the number of retweets you received?

Are you still judging a post by the number of likes that received?

Are you still writing '"cool lines posts" for obtaining likes insted of writing interesting posts that stimulates discussion and interaction?

If so, pkease pay attention: there is still much Twitter INSIDE YOU.

(It takes some time to heal 😉)