mastodon

Federation

Federation allows you to have an account on a server, maybe your own server, and share that identification with other servers without having to create yet another account. With regards to social spaces such as mastodon or plemora, this allows you to follow a group or individual and their posts will show on your home page.

Your ID

To get an ID you have to create an account with at least one server, be it social, micro-blogging, peer video or even the cloud like nextcloud. Once you have an account on a federated server you can follow other users using your ID which will be something like, @me@someserver.com.

For example my mastodon id is @codified@ignifi.social

Servers are Communities

Each server is a specific community run by a person or group sharing specific idea’s. You should check the server’s manifesto before joining, some are *nix based, others political and some nsfw. When you join a fresh server, it may not have much content but as you and other members follow others, the content will increase, as what you follow will be added to your home server.

Mastodon Life Hacks

You can typically find people to follow through tags, but yes you can google or duckduck, “mastondon social cats” for example, but to be honest the search engines struggle a bit with social media.

Instead you could search for tags in a little manual way.

mastodon.social federates all mastodon servers, or at least it seems it does, you can check the tags with:

https://mastodon.social/tags/cats

If you want to check for games, just swap “cats” for “games”, you should be able to create an interesting feed with that little trick.

Shameless Plug

I run a number of servers, some of them federated, most are free to join. You can generally always contact me through my matrix server: @codified:matrix.ignifi.me

Servers I run

  • ignifi.cloud - Nextcloud Instance - Invite Only
  • ignifi.social - Mastodon Instance - Twitter Alternative - Open
  • peertube.ignifi.me - Peertube Instance - Youtube Alternative - Approval Required and Heavily Moderated

Notes

My servers are generally a place to hang out with like minded individuals and friends so if you have an interest in games, music, linux/tech and the odd pic of cats, feel very welcome to join.

Edits

  • 2021-05-19 - Added a few more of my sites
  • 2022-11-04 - Fix the server links