The Council of Venice guide to Mastodon part 2

(The camera clicks on showing a slender Japanese woman in glasses wearing a white military style uniform with a blue beret) Greetings agents! I am envoy Yuuko Shirakawa and I am here to be your guide to Mastodon, the Fediverse and the world of decentralized social networks. So now you know what Mastodon and the Fediverse are, and you may want to try them but getting started might seem a little overwhelming, don’t panic because the Council of Venice has you covered! In this guide we will go over how to set up an account for Mastodon, Mastodons basic interface on the web, some of the basic etiquette in the wider Fediverse and how to follow Blue Sky accounts from Mastodon and how to follow Mastodon accounts from Blue Sky!
	Let’s start by setting up an account. Due to Mastodons decentralized nature the first step in creating an account is choosing a server. As covered in part 1 all servers can communicate with each other, and you can follow anyone on any server, and different servers will have different rules. They can also center around different topics, like the BBS’s of old or discord servers of today, Mastodon servers can focus on different things, there are servers for people who live in specific countries or who speak specific languages, there are servers for people interested in technology, art, games and almost anything else you can think of. Most people will want to join a general interest server though and then follow users from specialty servers as they see fit. The largest of these general interest servers is mastodon.social which is the default server used by the Mastodon app on iOS and Android,  however mastodon.world, mas.to, and universeodon.com, are all also good general interest servers. If you are having trouble deciding on a server, go to https://instances.social/ and then use the instances wizard to help choose a server that is right for you. Once you have a server go to the server’s webpage and register an account, depending on the server you choose you may need to wait for an admin to approve your registration but usually this will be near instant.
	Now that you have an account you should be able to login and if you are using the web app then you should see something like this (https://www.redhat.com/rhdc/managed-files/sysadmin/2022-11/mastodon-single-column.jpg), if you have used twitter most of the UI should be familiar to you, you can like and share post, make your own, and search for people or posts. When making a post you can control who sees them, (everyone, people you mention, just your followers etc) so on Mastodon there are no direct messages, instead there are messages that are directed to only one person which only the sender and receiver can see (which is effectively the same thing). The two things that you may not be familiar with though are the local and federated buttons (which are sometimes consolidated under a button that says live feeds.) These buttons allow you to see all the posts for your server and all the posts from federated servers respectively. If you are looking for new people to follow or are just interested in what’s going on, these are the places to watch, though remember the rules are different on each server so you may see things the violate your servers rules (though you will never see anything from a person you have blocked or a server that is defederated).
	The next button you might not be familiar with is the explore button, this lets you see posts from all the people you follow and all the people they follow. This is another good place to find new people to follow, in the explorer tab you can see what hashtags are trending in the Fediverse, you can also get recommendations on who to follow based on who you are currently following. This is also where you can see the news that’s trending in the Fediverse, these are the news stories being shared the most in the Fediverse for that day. Newer news stories posted by more different people are ranked higher in this tab. Most people will instead opt to follow trusted news sources instead of using this feature, but it can still be useful if you want to see what’s going on in the wider world. You can also organize your followers into list and view posts from people based on those lists, this can be useful if you follow people from multiple communities but only want to see what’s going on with a particular group, or if you follow people in different time zones and don’t want to scroll all the way through your feed to find their posts. If you have your own website, belong to an organization that has a website, or have a git hub page, then you can also verify your account! This can be done by using the preference button, clicking public profile, verification and then copying the link into your or your organization’s website or by adding the link to your Github profile.
	Now you have an account, and you have some people to follow, and you are ready to post so what do you need to know about posting etiquette in the Fediverse? One of the first things you will notice is that there will be a lot of posts that have to be clicked on to see their content, this is because these posts are behind a content warning. A content warning is just a link that hides a post until the user clicks on it. This helps people avoid content they don’t want to see or interact with, it is considered good etiquette to place NSWF content, political rants, or other content that be distressing behind content warnings, though you may also see post hidden behind content warnings as a joke, there are more than a few sphinx cats that are marked as NSFW. When posting photos or pictures, the culture of the Fediverse also encourages you to credit artist or source when you know it, and to give pictures alt text when possible. In the Fediverse being “the reply guy” is generally discouraged. A Reply guy is someone who excessively responds to social media posts, often in an annoying, condescending, or overly familiar or flirtatious manner. It is considered good etiquette too when replying to someone who doesn’t follow you to make a good first impression, by being polite and friendly and only if the post is current (don’t reply to posts that are months or years old). Finally, unlike other social media sites, in the Fediverse, you are encouraged to block people. Because the Fediverse is decentralized, you will encounter a lot of different people and they may not always be nice, but they also may not be violating your servers rules. So instead of fighting with them, you are encouraged to block and not interact with them at all, remember you don’t owe anyone your time or energy, if a one off comment turns into threats, harassment, or otherwise violate the servers rules, contact your servers admin and they will deactivate the persons account  or if they are on another server they will block them from the server.
	The next point is particularly relevant to our agents, after Elon Musk purchased twitter there was a slow but steady exodus of agents from the platform, about half have gone into the Fediverse, the other half have gone to Bluesky. So how do you stay in contact with agents who are on the other service? By using Bridgy Fed! Since both Bluesky and Mastodon are decentralized and open source, anyone can spin up their own. Bridgy Fed is a server that translates ActivityPub messages into Authenticated Transfer messages and then publishes them to their respective networks. To be discoverable on the other network you must follow the Bridgy Fed account on your own network, for mastodon this account is @[email protected] and for Blue Sky the account is @ap.brid.gy. Once you have bridged your account anyone on either service who is not blocked (on any level) can follow and communicate with them thus allowing agents on both networks to continue to work together. When searching for BlueSky accounts on Mastodon, search for @[email protected] and when looking for Mastodon accounts on Blue Sky look for USERNAME.SERVERNAME.com.ap.brid.gy or [email protected] and com.ap.brid.gy  respectively if you just want to see who is bridged. In our next section I will be answering your questions about the Fediverse and give some basic recommendations on phone and tablet applications, other web interfaces for Mastodon, and how Threads fits into everything.