CodeRefinery Mastodon account
CodeRefinery has started a Mastodon social media account.
November 08, 2022For the obvious reasons, CodeRefinery is looking into a Mastodon account. You can now find us at @coderefinery@fosstodon.org.
We will try to mirror to both, at least for the time being. If anyone has ideas about how balance the two, please let us know. We will have the CodeRefinery account follow other staff and interesting people related to CodeRefinery's mission, so if you are looking for other interesting people to follow to seed your network, check that out, too.
Mastodon is part of a federated social network, open source, and not under the influence of big companies - just what we should be supporting more of. Interested in joining yourself?
- https://mastodon.help gives a basic introduction of the how and why. https://fedi.tips/ gives a longer FAQ (and a separate introduction).
- Usernames are like emails with a username and a server name,
@username@server.name. - To join, you choose a server that you feel comfortable in, and they all communicate. Some recommendations are below.
- You can follow anyone regardless of their server, but the server you choose might affect what you see in the local timelines (for example, an art-focused server will probably have more stuff interesting to artists). Later, it's easy to move and automatically redirect your followers.
- When in doubt, just join somewhere that looks reasonable - don't let the Paradox of Choice hold back progress!
If you are just joining, you can start out by following CodeRefinery -
copy @coderefinery@fosstodon.org to your search and follow it. You
may be interested in following some of the people that we follow to
seed your list.
Deciding a server:
- We chose https://fosstodon.org (FOSS = "free and open source software") to focus on the software and technology side of things.
- For others in academia or research, https://fediscience.org/server-list.html is a very nice list of other interesting servers.
- https://mastodon.social/ is run by the non-profit that coordinates the Mastodon open-source project, but that does not mean you should necessarily prefer it.
- Do a web search for server lists. There are both news articles with broad recommendations, and searchable lists with many servers for specialized topics.
What you should know about Mastodon (especially vs. Twitter):
- It isn't designed to feed you content via internal algorithms: you have a much more active role in determining what you see. You need to find some people to follow, follow who they follow, and develop your network. At the same time, boost ("reblog") things that are good so that your network can see them.
- It's not designed for low-effort replies (quote-replies) since it makes engagement farming and negative attention. You can reply to posts with the reply button on each post. (don't forget you can click on post to see the thread).
- Use hashtags to make things searchable, there is no full-text search (to make it harder for random attacks based on opinions)
- "Fediverse" ("federated universe") is the term used to refer to the entire network of Mastodon servers (and more) that can communicate. It's not just Mastodon - ActivityPub can communicate across different types of servers, such as image hosting, video, blogging, etc. - in theory avoiding lock-in.
- The Mastodon network is currently absorbing millions of new users in a matter of days. Especially the popular servers can be a bit behind in all of the hidden network synchronization work.
We hope to see you there!