Here is my periodic reminder: block and mute early and often. You get to decide what your experience here looks like. You get to decide whom you want to interact with. There are literally millions of people here. You will not miss one of them.
For me personally, if the first time somebody tags me is annoying, it will probably also be the last.
Follow people early and often too! You can always unfollow later. The fediverse is what you make of it. Following lots of people is essential.
#FediTips

Anyone can create their own fully independent Mastodon server, and it's much cheaper and easier than you might think.

If you don't want to do the techy stuff, you can use a managed hosting provider who does all the techy stuff for you (installation, upgrades, fixes etc) as well as hosting your server. These typically cost about 5 to 10 euros/dollars per month for the smallest servers.

Here's a step-by-step guide covering the whole process:

https://growyourown.services/making-your-own-mastodon-server-in-10-steps

<Nim> A little bit of advice for any newcomers who can somehow see this: The fediverse doesn't look the same to everyone.

Leaving aside defederations, which vary wildly between instances and have been repeatedly likened to warring kingdoms, the way posts themselves are shown is not the same.

For instance, Misskey-flavored markdown — a text formatting language robust enough that artwork using it is fairly common — is baked in to misskey, it's forks, akkoma, and some mastodon forks. A post that relies heavily on MFM will look very different when sent to an instance that doesn't support it. Akkoma also has regular markdown and BBCode.

Another thing is quote boosts, which *keys, akkoma, and some masto forks have had for years, but mastodon only recently implemented in a completely different breaking manner.

Akkoma, *keys, and masto forks have unicode and custom emoji reacts ​​ , while vanilla masto does not. Emoji reacts replace likes in most keys, and how this works with regular likes changes from fork to fork and has sparked discorse on multiple occasions.

Even how timelines are rendered can be different; Akkoma will show you posts buried deep in threads, but most *keys by default will only show you OPs and when someone replies to themselves; *keys will show you every boost of a post, akkoma will usually only show you a post once.

Mastodon caps the number of attatchments at 4, while other software can go as high as 16. Mastodon has a hard-coded twitterlike character limit, some other softwares can go up to the tens of thousands of characters. And *key instances have an option that gives you cat ears and nyanifies your text.

And no two softwares implement hashtags the same.

Sharkey can share flash games with the ruffle plugin, and some instances of various software are modded with the ability to play tracker music

And this is only the microblogging software; there are image sharing softwares like Pixelfed and video sharing software like Peertube.
GoToSocial and Friendica are also microblogging software I've seen around, but I know very little about how they compare.

Now, I am not a fedi dev. These are based on what software I've used, and what others have said, and could be out of date, but it gets the point accross.

#feditips

If you are new to Mastodon, then remember to open your authenticator app on Friday at 7pm and post your six digit Time-based one-time password. Use the #totp hashtag to confirm your membership.

How to get your Mastodon timeline started:

1. Follow some hashtags (more info: https://fedi.tips/how-do-i-follow-hashtags-on-mastodon-and-the-fediverse).

2. Join some groups (more info: https://fedi.tips/how-to-use-groups-on-the-fediverse).

3. Discover accounts at https://fedi.directory. If you find an account on the site that you want to follow, copy-paste its Fediverse address into the search box in Mastodon.

Lots more tips for discovering accounts at https://fedi.tips/how-do-i-find-accounts-to-follow-on-mastodon-and-the-fediverse-how-do-i-find-my-friends

Welcome, new #Fediverse/#Mastodon folks emigrating from #BlueSky or anywhere else! Please ignore the gatekeepers and the scolds. They can get a little full of themselves, but the rest of us are pretty cool and are glad you're here. #FediTips

If you're using the official Mastodon mobile app, you might want to try using a third party app instead.

Third party apps tend to have more features than the official ones, and most people I know switch to third party apps after trying them. More info and lots of questions answered in the guide at:

https://fedi.tips/which-apps-can-i-use-should-i-use-the-official-app-or-a-third-party-app

Mastodon was designed to work through third party apps, and originally had no official apps at all.

Welcome to all refugees, recently arrived on Mastodon.

Things I'd recommend to new arrivals

- post about and Boost things you like to make more friends

- use and follow hashtags or accounts to find more on topics you like

- check out @FediTips , #fediTips or #mastoTips to learn more

- supporting accessibility is cool - here you can add /edit alt text for images, video and audio files on your posts

Das Fediverse in 4 Minuten erklärt:
soziale Medien – mit Respekt für Privatsphäre, selbstbestimmten Nutzer.innen und ganz ohne Big Tech.

https://digitalcourage.video/w/thFf16Yt9y8AMFz1k8P6v1

Video von @elena

For those new to the fediverse,

If your feed looks empty, I recommend following @hypebot - it checks multiple instances and boosts high quality trending posts. Really helps with discovery when you're starting out.

Also, @FediTips runs https://fedi.tips/ which has tons of helpful guides about Mastodon and the fediverse in general.

My only FediTip for the day is to follow @joybooster just because they boost fun, joyful things. Also was very pleasantly surprised to see they already boosted my Obituary for a Cookie post, but follow it anyway. Glad they focus on smaller accounts too! #Fediverse #FediTips #JoyScrolling #Joy #FediTip

what a lot of people don't understand about #mastodon (hello new #bluesky people) is that, due to the nature of federated servers, you're almost certainly not seeing some (or any!) of the responses to someone's post. to gain this important context, the default mastodon web client has an option in the three dots menu to "open original page". you will then be enlightened. #FediTips

I’m guessing there is no way to migrate my posts to a new instance? If not, I will likely not move my instance. Too much history here for me on mastodon.social.

Quick message to all fediverse newcomers:

Moderation in the fediverse is done by humans. There are no bots that shadowban you based on detecting certain keywords. This has some important consequences:

1) If you see a rule-breaking post, click the "report" button and write a report. The actual living, breathing creatures who run your instance will review the report.

The location of the report button varies depending on your client/app software: it's usually near "reply" or "boost."

2) The text you write in a report matters, because it will be read by an actual person. The mods are not just counting the number of reports.

3) If you're talking about a sensitive topic like suicide, you should not bleep it out like "sui-de". You won't be banned for typing the actual word out. You should instead use a content warning for your post to warn your readers.

#FediTips

Hi Newcomers

Looking for news sources here to follow?

These five tireless newsgatherers together contribute a lot to making Mastodon a great source for news and current opinion:

Laffy @GottaLaff - the amazing Laffy
Nonilex @Nonilex - great summaries
William Lindsey @wdlindsy - brilliant threads
Kriszta Satori @fulelo - international stories
Servelan @servelan - great selections

What are y'all's favourite Mastodon clients?
I am still using the default Android one from Mastodon and my browser.

Any recommendations?

Como parece que va a llegar gente nueva al fedi, aprovecho para enlazar la #FediGuia que escribí hace unos meses.

La guía explica cómo funciona el fediverso en general y aporta consejos sobre mastodon en concreto. Es un poco extensa, está pensada para ir consultando según se va usando el fedi, tanto para nueves navegantes que necesitan orientación como para fedinautas que llevan más tiempo y quieran repasar algunas funcionalidades.

Cualquier duda podéis mandarme un mensaje e intentaré contestar, dentro de mis conocimientos!

#mastodon #fediverso #fediverse #FediGuide #FediConsejos #FediTips #MastoConsejo #MastoTip #MastoAyuda #VamonosJuntas #descentraliza

https://sunny.garden/@kurio/114331956658821620