Tips on Using Mastodon

I’ve started using Mastodon over 3 years ago, in the aftermath of Twitter’s meltdown. At first I didn’t like it much, as there were a few things about it I found frustrating:

• You had to pick some instance to join (or host your own), so I spent quite a bit of time looking into various instances
• The default web UI was not my cup of tea - I found it to be complex and unwieldy. This was probably the main reason I didn’t enjoy using Mastodon at first.
• The interaction metrics (boosts, likes, etc) were often out-of-sync in different clients. That was improved in recent versions of Mastodon, but it was definitely surprising to me coming from Twitter.

Picking an instance

Eventually I realized the simplest thing you can do to have a nice Mastodon experience is to pick some reasonably popular instance (so you know it’s stable and won’t disappear after a while) and some decent third-party client. I never read the local timeline, so in the end I don’t think it matters much which instance you end up using. If you don’t want to waste time researching instances just go with the “default” mastodon.social instance. You can certainly do a lot worse, and of course, you can always move your account to another Mastodon instance down the road.

Picking a client

When it comes to clients, I’ve played with quite a few and enjoyed the most the following:

• Mona (native app for all Apple devices)
• Ivory (same as Mona, but with a simpler user interface)
• Phanpy (simple and sleek web client)

I’ve used Mona for about a year before switching to Ivory. Mona’s a good app overall, but I experienced some stability issues with it and I felt the UI was a bit cluttered. That’s why eventually I moved to Ivory. (plus I like their logo better) Both Mona and Ivory are proprietary apps and require a subscription to have access to all their features, but these are money well spent IMO. I really like desktop apps, so Mona and Ivory made my interactions with Mastodon way more pleasant (and frequent). Not that the webapps are bad, I just don’t like having a ton of pinned windows in my browser.

Hashtags

One more thing - embrace hashtags in Mastodon! Twitter had made those popular in its early days, but eventually moved away from them. They are quite alive in Mastodon and I use them extensively to follow topics that are important to me. (e.g. posts about various programming languages) So, it’s good to use them in your posts, so other people can discover your post via the hashtags.

That’s all from me on the topic for now. I hope you’ve learned something useful. In the Fediverse we trust!