dubikan

It seems like all explanations of #mastodon start either by explaining the technology, or explaining the jargon. Neither of these makes sense when trying to appeal to laypeople. Here's my approach to explaining it:

When you join Mastodon, you join a village. There are many villages in Mastodon, so you have to pick one, based on your interests, geographic area, or whatever is unique about the community. You can still talk to everyone else in other mastodon villages, but this one's yours.

If you want, you can always open the window and hear what everybody in your village says. You can't do that for other villages (unless you move there, or at least get yourself a second home there). To hear what people there are saying, you have to be in contact with them, personally.

Your village has a mayor. They're not elected. In fact, they're paying for all the infrastructure in your village. Maybe they're more of a landlord, really, but a benevolent one, because they're not charging you any rent. Still, if they ever come to you asking for a donation of taxes to support everything, give it some actual consideration.

Got it so far? OK, one more wrinkle: Mastodon isn't the only place full of villages. There are other places, that do different things than what Mastodon villages do – some of them specialize in posting pictures, or videos, or talking about books, or whatnot. You can also be in contact with the people over there (or maybe get yourself another home there, if you're interested — look at you, a real estate mogul!).

Right. Now we're ready for the jargon and the technology.

Mastodon is an open-source software that allows people to start villages (called instances), and become their mayors (admins). All the different places (services) full of villages (instances) are a part of one big federation of villages, which is called the #fediverse. When you open the window to listen to everything going on in your community, that's your local timeline. But if you're just listening to what the people you have a personal contact with (the ones you follow) have to say (toot), you can stay at your “home” feed. (There's also a federated timeline, which is where you can listen to all the noise made throughout the federation. Maybe that's your radio?).

This doesn't cover everything, of course. There are other things going on (and hey, I've been around for less than a week, so there's definitely stuff I don't understand yet!), but they don't matter so much for you as somebody who's just looking for something that works basically like that site with the blue bird. You know the one. Mastodon has all that – retweets (we call them “boosts”), likes (“favorites”), the works.

So how do you start? First, pick a village. There are (incomplete) maps of the fediverse, allowing you to filter villages by the main language spoken, or various interests. You can start here, or if you know anyone already in the fediverse, you might want to join their village. I've set up homes in sciences.social and the Canadian canada.masto.host, for example. Most villages will also allow you to just visit and listen in to conversations, so you can decide if you want your home to be there. Just look for the “local timeline” when you visit.

Your address for people to find you will be @[email protected]. A bit like with phone area codes, people in your village can just call you by your @name, but people from other villages will have to know what village you're in to find you – after all, there may be people with the same name elsewhere! The same is true when you want to find people – you need to know their username, as well as their village, to find them.

So pick a village, open the window, and enjoy the calming toots of the gentle mastodon.