My Experience with Mastodon

https://ift.tt/2MkSU7H
Mastodon, Mastodon, Mastodon, what is Mastodon anyway? It is a social network with elephant logo, and unlike Facebook or Twitter, it's social toward other social networks. For me seeking free software and privacy respecting social network which is huge, Mastodon is a match. It is fun. Let me share my experience with you since I first registered 2019. Happy sharing!

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I Found My Community

(KDE is active at Mastodon as @kde)

I love to find people who are supportive to software freedom. People call them with many names, Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) community is among the name. First, I found Mastodon instance that is straightforward to what I am looking for, it is named FLOSS.social. This becomes my identity as my Mastodon handle is ademalsasa@floss.social. Second, I can be friend with people I already knew on other places, such as KDE and Ubuntu, and the users, and the developers. So easily I can follow people I in my own field want to know about. Third, I can speak freely to them and they even replied and boosted me.

(Finding ubuntu)

You know, even the Mastodon owner (read: my instance admin) replied to me and Mastodon creator (@Chocobozz) and Framasoft themselves (@Framasoft) boosted me as well. These are what I am looking for up to today which I cannot find even with Reddit. To achieve all this, I do not need to sacrifice my freedom (facebook) nor deny federation (twitter) as I got them all with this free software free society social network, Mastodon. I believe if you love FLOSS you will love to join Mastodon. I am satisfied I found my community.

(Tag)

Hashtags are closer to my own field! I can find trending keywords like #ubuntu, #foss, #linux, even #gnu within Mastodon I hardly find on Twitter. This adds the feelings at home here.

I Share Freely

Mastodon has superb sharing features. In Twitter it is called tweet, here it is called toot. It is good to see 500 characters per toot, public/private choice, and followers only visibility. The ultimate thing is, by one toot your message reaches multiple different social networks.

Resharing in Twitter is to retweet – retweeted – retweeting, in Mastodon it is to boost – boosted – boosting. Personally, I do boost far more often here than in Twitter or even Reddit. Perhaps it's because Mastodon is still young I got the feelings that “nobody knows me” different to when I use Facebook or Twitter and I enjoy that a lot.

As example I display here some of my precious Mastodon toots. I have five toots which got nice reactions from Mastodon users.

• Code Hostings Feb 2020
• Writer Guide Jan 2020
• PeerTube Guide May 2020
• Help Quit GitHub April 2020
• BigBlueButton Guide April 2020

I Have Fun

(Interesting poll by @redstarfish)

Our free software community is fun. Even seeing the domain names is already amusing. You see, my instance is FLOSS.social, and there are another instance named FOSStodon.org, and social.LINUX.pizza, DEBIAN.social, even BSD.network, and everything else. I have fun seeing people care a lot about free software that I care about. It is also fun to see instance like mastodon.social as it's like seeing facebook.com being facebook.social.

I Experience Things Nowhere to Find

It is the federation. Federation is internet, it takes back control to the hand of internet users once again. Unlike Facebook et. al., my new social network is social as I said, it is integrated to other social networks. If you have little computing knowledge, you will know every visitable item in internet is hosted on an individual computer machine called server. Now, Facebook server is not connected to Twitter server, but Mastodon servers are interconnected with each other, and Mastodon is connected to PeerTube, Pixelfed, and other amazing social networks. For example, in Mastodon I speak freely with Dr. Roy of Techrights.org although he is actually not using Mastodon and this is impossible with Facebook.

On Mastodon, I display my Website, Twitter, Online Course, and User Interface information personal to me (at least up to today). If you see my profile, you know that I write on ubuntubuzz.com, have a twitter, teach GNU/Linux online at Teknoplasma, and use KDE. Those are called profile metadata the four pairs of information user can freely make them up. That is another unique thing Facebook & Twitter do not have and I really appreciate that.

 

(My Mastodon profile)

Thanks to @Eugen the creator of Mastodon, the whole world can share freely & safely once again on the internet including me. I am happy with Mastodon so far and I am looking forwards for more excellent experience. I hope this little article of mine helps you to know Mastodon more.

Enjoy sharing once again!

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This article is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
Originally posted here: https://ift.tt/2MemMTl