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.

Eventually I realized the simplest things you can do to have a nice Mastodon experience is to pick some reasonably popular instance (so you known 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’re 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.

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.

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 a 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!