Mastodon Basics: Getting Started on a Community Server

There are many different communities on Mastodon, and the greater Fediverse. In many ways, they’re like villages, with different personalities, topics, and rules. Almost all of them are run by volunteers, and server expenses are covered by donations from community members. A very different model from centralized platforms that rely on advertising.

Before joining a community instance, you should check to see if it looks like a good fit for you. Check the instance ‘Rules’. Some might surprise you, but they usually exist for good reasons, and often because something bad happened in the past.

Mastodon is different from centralized social platforms, and it can be a little confusing at first. I’ve been working on writing up explanations for my own community, on vis.social.

Here is a short version for anyone interested in joining a community on Mastodon.

“Instance”, “Server”, “Community”

These words are often used interchangeably, and some folks prefer one over another. In a non-technical sense, they all basically refer to the same thing: software installed and running an a server, used by an online community.

Local timeline

The Local timeline is the heart of many Mastodon communities, especially the smaller ones. It contains all the posts from accounts on the instance that are public. See ‘unlisted’