How to use Mastodon without feeling lost
So the social media hellsc…sorry, landscape is a bit chaotic these days. Like many people, I decided to stop using Twitter as much as possible and have been exploring alternatives. One of the places that clicked with me was Mastodon. To be honest, I tried it a few years ago as well and didn’t really grasp it at the time, but this time I got it.
Now, many people in my circles are actually on Bluesky and I haven’t really been interested in that because it’s such a walled garden. I can’t see what’s happening there, so how would I know if I like it?
Then I realised, the same is true for Mastodon. Yes, it’s open and you don’t need invites to join, but everyone’s Mastodon experience looks very different. I can sort of understand why people were intimidated by the server choice and never signed up, but I didn’t understand why people who joined left. Recently, Erin Kissane did a bit of asking around and now I get it a bit better.
One of the reasons seems to be that people just didn’t really find their people, or found it hard to follow people. I haven’t had this problem, and really the only thing that I would recommend is to set up the “advanced web interface” in Mastodon’s settings. This is how I mainly use Mastodon and it solves so many problems.
But let me just show you, through some screenshots of what it looks like for me when I use Mastodon:
The image above are the first three columns of the way that I’ve set up my advanced web interface. It’s customisable, although the last column (not shown here) is always last, which is honestly the only thing that annoys me about it. But above you see the column where I can post, reply or search, the column with the feed of people I subscribed to and the column with notifications. This is exactly how I had Tweetdeck set up so it was super familiar.
Scrolling on to the right, you see the start of my many “pinned columns”. All of these are for hashtag searches for topics that I found interesting. (The first one is a music column because it always cheers me up before we get to the more serious stuff but you can obviously choose whatever you want). If I see interesting people in here, I can follow them directly, with no extra steps, even if they are on a different server. Again, just like how it was on Tweetdeck.
Scrolling further, you see the rest of my columns. The last one, which now says “getting started” is the place where you can find your settings or links to your local instance (which I never use). However, this column also shows you other people’s profiles when you click on them. So it’s a really useful panel, and it shouldn’t be that far to the right. I realise it’s on me to have set up fifty gazillion interest columns in between, but I still want this panel to be further to the left. Anyway, that’s my only complaint.
Next, let’s go all the way back to the first column, so I can show you how easy it is to search for people or things.
The BBC recently joined Mastodon and I know there are some accounts I’m not following yet, so I typed in “bbc” in the search box.
As you see, there’s a choice of search types. I selected “profiles”.
I found their five accounts, and can easily see which three I wasn’t following yet. All I did to follow them was click “follow”. It doesn’t matter that they’re on a different server! Honestly I never think about servers.
Next, I want to quickly show how useful the pinned columns are, and to reassure you that you don’t need as many as I had. Each column started with a search for one hashtag, but you can easily add additional hashtags to the same column, so that a variety of related topics all show up in one place. Let’s update my column “science” to include some more hashtags that I think will appear in posts I’m interested in. Click the settings icon (purple in the image below) and select “include additional tags for this column”.
Then I added a whole bunch of additional hashtags here.
These will now all show up in the same column.
These columns are mainly how I discover new people, or find posts that I want to boost. They’re not too overwhelming even for popular topics like “London” or “science”, because it only picks up hashtags, not general mentions of the word. So you only get posts where people thought “yes, this is something that will be relevant to people searching for this topic”.
The flipside is that you also need to add hashtags to your own posts if you want to be discovered by people who aren’t following you yet, but that is something you should be used to from many other platforms anyway.
I hope this was useful! You can follow me on Mastodon if you’re into random science things. (And remember, the easiest way to do that is to search “easternblot” in your advanced web interface. Saves you a bunch of clicks!)
