Get started with Mastodon
Fed up with Twitter? Mastodon offers a billionaire-free alternative
IT WILL TAKE
> 20 minutes
YOU WILL LEARN
> You will learn what Mastodon is and how to use it
YOU’LL NEED
> A browser, and a bit of patience
Mastodon has been a big beneficiary of Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover; with Twitter in apparent chaos and lots of previously banned users being allowed back on, many people have been looking for a more pleasant alternative. For many, Mastodon is that alternative. It has very strong anti-abuse rules, and with a bit of effort you can make it just as easy to use as Twitter.
Mastodon works a bit like email; in much the same way you can have yourname@iCloud.com or yourname@gmail.com, there are different Mastodon servers for different people. Mastodon calls them ‘instances’, and there are instances for journalists, drummers, environmentalists… and so on. You can see posts from and communicate with people from other instances, just like you can email Gmail users from your iCloud mail.