Hi, I'm new here & I don't know how this works but I'm glad to be on a mammoth. Or an Octodon. Or a Mastodon. #introduction #sendhelp

@Imanoctopus Think of Mastodon as kinda like Twitter, but spread out across multiple interdependent servers, and better because most of the servers don't tolerate Nazis and other assholes.

@starbreaker ha, that's a very good point, thanks. No one wants assholes. But the 3 columns are giving me a bit of anxiety, It looks hella fun tho.

@Imanoctopus It's a little confusing at first, but give it some time. The home column is everybody you follow. Notifications is stuff directed toward you, and you can control what appears there. The local timeline is everybody on the same server as you, and the federated timeline is a firehose made of public posts from all over the network.

I'd suggest doing an #introduction post where you hashtag a few interests so people can find you, and watching local for interesting people to follow.

@starbreaker Ha, I see ! Luckily I have a friend here helping me a bit right now. Thank you for the #introduction tips, I'll def make one. It's like Twitter but much, much bigger. A mix between Twitter and Reddit maybe ?

@Imanoctopus I think of it more like twitter meets email/usenet, but I'm old. :)

@starbreaker Na I see what you mean! I suggested Reddit because it feels like there's one big base (mastodon) and then many sub-mastodon (baby mastodons) . But I might be completely wrong considering I've been here for like 10min.

@Imanoctopus Pretty close, but when you look closer Reddit is centralized and owned by a single corporation.

I think of Mastodon as more like email because, while there are big masto servers the same way there are big email providers, anybody who wants to can set up their own Mastodon server.

@starbreaker Haa yes you're absolutely right. Then Mastodon is definitely better. So does that mean there's more freedom but also better monitoring because each server is independent, therefor there's many more ''admin'' ? (am I making sens? English is hard)

@Imanoctopus Your English is much better than my French. You're doing fine.

There is more freedom because if I wanted to, I could start my own instance and post anything I wanted, no matter how offensive.

Nobody would be able to stop me from posting grossly offensive shit from my own server or allowing others to do so, but they *can* refuse to let their server federate with mine.

We can't eliminate crap entirely, but we can keep it contained.

@starbreaker Oooh okok. Now I get it. You explained it very simply, thank you ! That's awesome.

@Imanoctopus You're welcome. You'll find you've picked a good server here on Octodon.

You'll probably like @ayachan and @catoutofbed, and @MissSnarkerson is one of my biggest fans here.