A Mastodon Guide for Indie Musicians (And The Journalists Who Love Them)

UPDATED: 11/26/22

Hello! I hopped over to Mastodon about two weeks ago, once Elon began making increasingly strange pronouncements. I don’t know if it will “replace” Twitter (it doesn’t need to!), or if Twitter will actually collapse, but so far I’ve really enjoyed my experience and wanted to demystify it for anyone who is Masto-curious.

A lot of guides to Mastodon are, I think, more focused on the technology than the experience. I’m going to focus on that and then discuss the tech, though my only qualifications for that is that I am an overly online millenial who remembers what it was like to use forums and Deadjournal (I was too cool for the other one) and took a couple of compsci classes.

I put a Twitter thread about this together briefly last night. This one will have far fewer autocorrect fails.

This is pretty long but I hope the section breaks are helpful.

The Mastodon Experience

When you sign in to Mastodon, you will have three feeds and a notification bar.

  • Home: This is like your timeline. You will only see posts from the people you follow, the people they re-post (or “boost”), and any hashtags or groups you follow. There is no algorithm! More about that next.
  • Local: You will only see posts by the other people on your server here. More on that in the server section.
  • Global: This shows you, in real-time and chronologically, all public posts in all servers. Madness.

You’ve probably heard that you have to pick a server when you join. This is only useful to the extent that you care about using the local feed.

Choose Your Server

As I’ve said, it doesn’t matter so much to start, especially now that more people are joining directly from Twitter you can follow hashtags in your Home feed. (This update, 10 years in the making, was fortuitously rolled out on Tuesday.) I am on one of the larger servers, so the local feed is no longer interesting to me now that I follow enough people that my feed updates fairly often. Because there are a few thousand people on there and the server theme is “be gay,” the local feed doesn’t do much for me and, if I end up sticking around, I’ll likely move to a smaller server.

Speaking of moving, it is possible to move servers at any time! But, just like when you switch e-mail addresses, you can take your contacts/followers with you, but not the e-mails itself.

So let’s actually talk about the servers. These are all volunteer-run (and often have Patreons set up to contribute because they are pretty expensive.) This means that the server is pretty much beholden to the rules that the admin(s) create and are willing and able to enforce.

For example, there are a number of servers that are festering with neo-Nazis. Because Mastodon is not technically owned by any one person*, most servers simply block posts from the problematic ones. But these lists are crowd-sourced and only as up-to-date as the ability of the server admin to keep up. Unfortunately, this meant that as more users from Twitter used #BlackTwitter and #BlackMastodon, admins were caught flat-footed when trolls viciously targeted those users. For reasons I’ll explain next, I have only learned of these things second-hand on my feed, whereas I probably would have seen the posts themselves on Twitter.

More benignly, a bunch of mainstream journalists created the Journa.Host server and invited some writers from the National Review on there. A number of servers blocked the entire server as a result, which meant that nobody on those servers can see any posts from Journa.Host. Of course, if you think that’s too extreme, you can jump ship to another server. Server admins publicly announce these decisions, and they often get boosted across servers via the Home feed. (UPDATE: There’s been yet more controversy with journa.host that I personally attribute to the admins having to face a learning curve under extremely heightened scrutiny.)

If you just want to check it out, I recommend hopping on to any open server. This guide has a list of servers that have more rigorous moderation practices and is geared towards BIPOC users.

With all that said, there are a few music-related servers:

If Mastodon seems to stick, Jeremy Leroux, the architect of the Country Everywhere directory for BIPOC, LGBTQ+ and disabled artists, will build an Americana-specific server.

Journalism/Writing servers:

There is no centralized list of servers, and I know I’m leaving some out. Here are two server directories, but they’re not comprehensive.

*A guy named Eugen is the lead developer for the code, but my understanding is he is by no means the sole founder though he is treated as such by (male) tech writers. Like Zuck and Jack, he’s not interested in deciding who can and can’t access the network or what they use it for.

No Algorithm, No Virality, No Masters

Your feed is chronological — just like you asked for on Twitter! There are pros and cons to this. The biggest con is that you do see everything someone reposts. One of my former professors went on a #caturday repost spree. On Twitter, the algorithm would bury all but the most popular posts, and probably know I almost never interact with cat posts.

So, that’s annoying, but it also incentivizes being thoughtful about what you boost. Other pros:

  • No more grind: Your feed is chronological, so you don’t have to game when to post, or post multiple times a day. Use a hashtag and the people who don’t already follow you will find you.
  • No doomscrolling: You only see what the people you follow boost. Eventually, you will run out of new things to read. Unless you want to risk seeing a bunch of uncensored dicks on the public Global feed (some servers require a content warning, others don’t, so the Global feed is a free-for-all.)
  • No viral posts: This is a blessing and a curse, but I think more of a blessing. You do not need to cultivate a brand or be King Shitposter! In fact, posting your shit several times a day will likely annoy your followers. I already unfollowed a guy who only posted not-very-compelling excerpts from his novel. Your posts will move across the network as people boost/repost it. On the home feed, you only see if someone has responded to a post, not how many people have responded. That means there’s just not that much incentive to be controversial because most people will see it and move along (or block you) rather than slow down and read the car wreckage of replies. Someone tried to sell a fucking tank and I only found out about it because somebody boosted Eugen’s post about it.
  • Know who your following: It’s just not practical to follow thousands of people on here. That makes for a more intimate experience and it means I’m signing in to this app to learn more from people whose perspectives I find valuable.

Who Uses This and How Do I Find People?

So far the majority of the user base is European, but of course that’s changing as people come from Twitter. As a writer, I like this because I’ve found many Americana artists in the UK through the hashtag and I never would have found them on Twitter.

Again, hashtagging your posts with just about anything you can think of will help people find you. It also has the unintended consequence of helping you figure out if you want to read a post just by looking at the hashtags.

There is also a thing called a group. If you follow the group account, you will see all posts by anyone who tags the group. I think this is less useful now that you can follow hashtags (your hashtags used to be in a separate feed) but here’s the Americana one: americana@a.gup.pe

You can also use these two tools to find your Twitter pals. They can find you when you list your full Mastodon username in your profile.

I’m Sticking Around

In terms of my social media diet, I’ve been spending less time on Twitter and more on Discord anyway. No matter what happens, I am beginning to treat Twitter like I do Facebook and Instagram: kind of an obligation that I’ll look at for a few minutes a day just to see what my pals on those networks are up to. As discussed, Twitter and Facebook algorithms reward attention-seeking and combative behavior and I always feel worse after however many hours I spend doomscrolling. So far, that’s just not the vibe on Mastodon. Hopefully I’ll see you there! You can follow me at rachelcholst@mastodon.lol

Addendum: Technical Stuff

If you think those long annoying usernames look like e-mail addresses, that’s because they are. As near as I can figure, Mastodon is simply e-mails that are posted to a public feed (like other networks, you can also limit posts to followers or a single person. That last one is basically a DM.) So, following the Americana group is literally signing up for a listserv.

There are a lot of other interesting aspects of Mastodon’s culture, like accessibility for visually-impaired users, and content warnings, but others have already written about that.