mastodon.social is one of the many independent Mastodon servers you can use to participate in the fediverse.
The original server operated by the Mastodon gGmbH non-profit

Administered by:

Server stats:

373K
active users

Hey new people and those thinking of joining, you do NOT need to sign up on huge servers!

You can follow and interact with people on any server from any server, the servers are connected.

It would really, really help the network right now if you could sign up on medium or small size servers. You will still be able to follow and interact with whoever you want, and the network as a whole will work much better.

A good safe place for beginners to find servers to join is joinmastodon.org/servers

You also don't need to be on the same server as your friends.

You can find each other from different servers by exchanging account addresses, here's how it works:

fedi.tips/how-to-use-mastodon-

It's a bit like exchanging phone numbers!

p.s. By the way, a lot of the servers on joinmastodon.org/servers say "get on waitlist" but this phrasing is misleading.

A lot of these servers don't have a waitlist at all and will accept you pretty quickly, within a few hours in some cases. It's just the server admin is screening out spammers by switching on the "why do you want to join?" form, because spambots find this form harder to cope with.

Jonobie

@feditips what happens if you join on a server that the owner later decides to just delete?

@Jonobie @feditips As long as you get a warning in advance, you can export and import your account into other servers. If you do not trust the server, a monthly export as a backup might be a good idea - or moving to a trustful server.

@sofiii @feditips thanks, sounds like there aren’t really any software guardrails though if someone just decides to drop a server? That feels faintly precarious as this all gets bigger, although it’s good to see things like covenants for not doing it. (I started to look at running my own server, though the one in English I saw seems like everything is “temporarily unavailable”, I’m guessing due to the current surge? masto.host/pricing/ )

@Jonobie @feditips Yes, it is worrisome (with every Internet service). It is enough to when an account gets deactivated.

I expect that one of the apps will provide an automated backup function. I will do it manually from the website until I figured something out:
mastodon.social/settings/export

Maybe someone else knows more about an automated backup?

@Jonobie

The servers on that list have agreed to the "Mastodon Covenant" involving reliability and moderation. They have promised to give a certain amount of warning before closing down. I think the warning period is three months?

This gives you time to transfer your account to another server, including your follows and followers:

fedi.tips/how-to-use-mastodon-

@feditips according to this explanation, it is a bit misleading then when you sign up and you're told to "choose a server, but don't worry, you can later move to a different one", as you can't transfer your posts (which I'd argue is an important part of one's account).

I guess I need to decide soon where I'm likely to want to stay, before I post too much... :)

@RuthiBrandt @feditips
At a pinch in the even of a server vanishing you could feed your profile to the Wayback Machine for archiving, and download a copy of all your posts directly from the instance for the record too.

@wiredfire @feditips but that doesn't help you add them to your new account, does it?

@RuthiBrandt @feditips

It does not. But the content doesn’t need to vanish entirely. It’s a trade-off for sure, but on balance I believe we get a lot more form Mastodon / fediverse than we lose.

@wiredfire @feditips oh this wasn't a dig at Mastodon, or the fediverse. I'm quite excite by this place potential 🙂

I just think the 'you can easily move your account later' thing needs to be a bit more accurately explained (and maybe the celever tech people will find a way to solve this issue at some point? 🤞)

@RuthiBrandt @feditips

The biggest thing that is really coming out of the current influx of new users, is that mastodon, and the fediverse, could definitely do a lot more to help communicate the core concepts to newcomers interested in exploring these spaces.

@wiredfire @RuthiBrandt @feditips
And ideally in a way that is easy for people without tech knowledge to understand. Many of my friends run away just seeing the word “server” without some clear , reassuring context.
As it is now, not only does a newbie have to do some digging to add people on other instances (and even that sometimes fails at the search level), but the mastodon site is unclear on how that person joins at all. It’s there, but not in the front page and not very clear.

@brookhinton @RuthiBrandt @feditips

Any new platform has a learning curve, but onboarding could certainly be easier here.

Still, there’s some high profile accounts that offer a great deal of guidance & increasingly I’m seeing Joe Public see enough noise to push through to see what it’s all about.

I’m sure it’ll get better when the Mastodon team have a chance to address it and aren’t busy fielding media requests & putting out server fires 😅