Matthew Graybosch is a user on octodon.social. You can follow them or interact with them if you have an account anywhere in the fediverse. If you don't, you can sign up here.

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.

@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 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 tips, I'll def make one. It's like Twitter but much, much bigger. A mix between Twitter and Reddit maybe ?

@Imanoctopus @starbreaker

I wouldn't say it is "bigger" per se.

instances.social/list/old

"There are currently 1.985 instances being tracked, with a total of 1.083.717 users."

BUT, it is certainly better to have 1.985 servers by normal, private people than one large corporation (e.g. twitter)!

Each server is 'federated' with many of the other servers and each has its own admin. You could do it yourself.

Most just have 1 rule: don't be an asshole ;-)

Matthew Graybosch @starbreaker

@gemlog @Imanoctopus

I'd say that a user base of 1 million across 1,985 servers is pretty respectable considering that Mastodon is at most a couple of years old.

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@starbreaker @Imanoctopus Yes, it's wonderful! I'm not belittling masto at all and I've never used the corporate sites of fb and twitter. Just that twitter is claiming over 300 mm active users per month vs the 1mm of masto, but masto can get there in time too I hope.
I was simply correcting Imanoctopus and pointing out the good part that is bigger: federation.