How to Use Mastodon - Twitter Alternative

there's a brand new social media platform out there called Mastodon and it's becoming the biggest competitor to Twitter right now so if you're looking for an alternative to Twitter this is going to come as close as you could get without actually using Twitter and unlike Twitter Mastodon is a little bit different it is not owned by any individual person or by even an individual company it's a decentralized platform and I'll explain exactly how it's laid out but you could do a lot of the same things you do inside of Twitter for example you could create a profile you could post text you could post photos videos and you could follow other users as well but the one big difference between Mastodon and Twitter for example is Mastodon is not one centralized website or app I'm going to show you exactly how to get the app and set it all up but basically it's bunch of different servers sometimes they refer to these as instances that you could join these are all set up by different people you could set up your own server for example and these are all interconnected as well but you join an individual server and each server will have their own rules again it's decentralized so it's not just one Central platform and there's a couple of ways to use this platform one is you could just use the website to sign up but I'll show you the app here they have it for iPhone and iPads in iOS and they also have an Android version that's very much similar to what I'm about to show you it's a much easier way to use it if you've ever used Twitter on your phone this will be very familiar to you I'm going to go ahead and download this app here and then go ahead and open it up and here on the home page you will have to create an account so I wanted to show you this because it's a little bit different than what you're used to with other social media platforms it's going to right here ask you to join a server so as I said it's not one centralized place where you make one account you have to actually join one of these servers so you could use a regional server for example that is near you could also do this by different categories so under arts or music or tech for example is what I'm in you're going to find bunch of different servers so I'm going to choose one here but the cool thing is they have this thing called the federal verse okay the federal verse basically is a way you could connect with other people in other servers so this is not going to lock you in this one server but you should pick one around your interest press next and you're gonna get some rules here that you have to agree with now again these are set at the server level so I'm going to press next here and I'm going to choose a display name and a username now the interesting thing about your username is basically looks like an email so at whatever server you chose is going to be at the end of your username so make sure you're okay with that and then choose a username and a display name and you'll have to verify with your email so I'll just confirm and just like other social media platforms you may want to go ahead and find people here to follow I'll go ahead and press plus here to add let's say five people I'll press done and now if I press the home page it's going to refresh and show you the things here that are posted by the people I'm following now one more unique thing about this platform there is no algorithm here basically things are just available here for you to look at based on when they were posted in order few other things to look at you have the search option again you could search for posts hashtags and you could search for different users here you have your post option in the middle so you could actually type what's on your mind the limit for this is 500 characters a little bit different than Twitter here so you could go ahead and type it out you could see that and these are called toots instead of tweets on Twitter and you have options such as choosing a photo here you have polls and this privacy option right here this last one is really important if I choose public that's by default anybody on this platform that could find it could see it but I could do followers only if I just want the people that are following me right now I don't have any so that wouldn't make any sense so then go ahead and type it in I'm gonna do a poll here and you could press publish on top and I'll show you my own profile here if I go to the profile tab you could see again how many times I've posted will show here following and followers and this is my profile picture here I did not change it when I created my account you could go ahead and press share if you want to share this your account with other people or you could just give them the ad handle here again you see it has two ad signs because it's based on the server that you chose so this is my handle here again at this server anyone that sees this post here they could go ahead and comments on it so the comment section is very simple here this is like a retweet so if you wanted to do a retweet you could click this right here you could go ahead and favorite something and then again you could share this individual post here as well here's your notification icon here so anything that happens will appear under the Bell icon and under the search option there's also at the end a 4 or

you section here so you could go ahead and follow other things here related to things you've already followed and you could click on someone's profile here to see their profile to see how many people are following them how many followers they have and then read their posts and again you have all these things available for interacting with any individual post here now I'm back on the home page and you could see my own post is showing up right on top and if you take a closer look here you could see these people are not on my server right they're at mastodon. social but I could still follow them here okay so you can still follow them and you could still look at their post and interact with their post okay so you don't have to be on the same server to interact with people things are just organized under a different server but you could interact with people from different servers as well so that's your quick introduction to Mastodon I hope you find it useful and I'll see you on the next video