It was born as a free social network, open to anyone who wants to interact quickly and all without any censorship. Mastodon is a good alternative to the well-known Twitter, you can post messages for certain people to read, but you have the option to have them read by everyone within the network.
Mastodon has been with us for quite a few years, despite not reaching the numbers of its competitor, it has been getting millions of visits since its launch in 2016. Like any other, it is necessary to go through a brief registration, use an alias and start meeting people on it.
We are going to explain what Mastodon is, the social network in which you can talk in a relaxed way and without being censored for what you say. This microblogging network maintains a similar aesthetic and the functions become similar, which is why it has always been compared to the one created by Jack Dorsey.
What is Mastodon?
It is a microblogging social network that has been taking steps to grow in these past six years, it is the current life of Mastodon currently. Once we start with our user we will have to follow accounts to see content, you can also gain followers if you publish important content.
Mastodon works as a decentralized federation of servers, it is open source, being available to everyone as the code has been shared on GitHub. The social network is made up of several networks, in which the user can create different servers (known as communities).
Thanks to these servers you can send messages that they are read by the users that you decide, being from a closed circle. Another option is that the messages can be read by the entire community, for this you must publish in the general as also happens on Twitter.
Each community or instance creates its own rules, if the administrator sees that you are missing any of them, he can ban a user or account. The Mastodon social network itself has minimum standards, excludes xenophobic messages, sexist, racist messages and child pornography.
First step, register
The first step to start using Mastodon is to register, requires a brief registration with a few fields to fill in, it is the basics in social networks. The alias (known as nick) is essential, an email, password and little more than that for access to the microblogging network.
As you can see, the page shows the well-known dark theme that we know, it comes in handy especially if you quickly adapt to it, in our case we have done it. It is a basic site at first glance, but there are quite a few options available once you sign up and start using the service.
To sign up for Mastodon, do the following:
- The first thing is to access the Mastodon.social page, click in "Register"
- Once you click on “Register” it will show you the fields to fill in, which are a total of only four
- It will ask you for the “Username”, an email address and the password, you must repeat it to confirm, then accept the conditions and click on “Register”
- It will send you a confirmation email, you have to activate the account, click on the button and wait for it to take you to Mastodon.social, already with the alias
It is a quick process, we will not need more than two minutes to sign up for the Mastodon service and start using this popular social network. If you're very into Twitter, you're going to get used to it in a matter of time, which isn't going to be long, although it has to be said that some things change.
The working of mastodon
Messages in Mastodon are called Toots, it differs from Twitter tweets, we can also write a maximum of 500 characters. Twitter currently allows a total of 280 characters, which despite seeming few are enough if you want to write a fairly long message.
When writing a Toot you can do it in three different lines, which are called "main timeline", "Federated history" and "Local timeline". To that you can add an image, because not everything is going to be text, you also have selectable emoticons.
Just like on Twitter, on Mastodon you can mention, To do this, put the @ and select the user you want to mention in that «Toot». It is easy to do all this if you have used Twitter or continue to use it today, it is a way to get fully into this social network.
Edit your profile
Once you register, the important thing to be recognized is to adjust the profile, put a photo and make up your wall as much as possible in case someone visits it. Mastodon will let you make any type of change, this has been improved over time so that the user or company can fully customize it.
Imagine visiting a profile and seeing only the "alias", that does not generate any trust, neither to you nor to anyone who visits it, something that has an easy solution. If you have entered through the website, enter with your account (email and password) and wait for the familiar Mastodon dashboard to load.
Do the following steps to edit the profile:
- Start Mastodon.social and wait for it to load completely
- Under your alias with the @ it will show you the option “Edit profile”, click on it and it will take you to your profile
- It gives you the options of any social network, in this case the “Display Name”, «Biography», already on the right side you have to put the header and the «Avatar»
- Finally, click on “Save changes” and voila, everything will be complete and saved to be seen by your followers
Download the application
Mastodon has an official application in the Play Store, it is the same as the web service, you can do everything and interact with your account and others that you follow. Mastodon has barely 50.000 downloads, despite this, people have been preferring to access it through the Mastodon.social page in recent times.
The Mastodon app is improving in the latest updates and is available for free, both on Android and iOS. The tool has automatic login and many functions which are also available on the page. The interface is the same dark theme.
