Mastodon Facebook status (English)

To all my Facebook friends: In the last few days, I've discovered the best, coziest, most intelligent, social medium I've ever encountered. In a few days, I've gotten tons of feedback and friends. I actually feel happy when I use this medium, and I have never in my life experienced that on social media before.

 

On this medium, it is not your status or popularity that counts, and everyone has an equally good chance of being heard. On other social media they ask you to follow people and be active, but that never works, does it? You sit there and type into nothing and never hear back from anyone.

 

This is not what Mastodon, as the service is called, is like. Mastodon is open to everyone. However, there isn’t one great website called Mastodon where everyone is a user. Mastodon is free software and decentralized. There are hundreds of Mastodon sites, called instances, worldwide, with over 300,000 users.

 

Mastodon users are named by username and instance name. My user name is thor@snabeltann.no, and is not unlike an e-mail. You can mention (tag) me by typing @thor@snabeltann.no.

 

The instances talk together. Just like you can send an e-mail from ola@hotmail.com to kari@gmail.com, you can also post a status from ola@snabeltann.no and mention kari@mastodon.social so she sees it. If Ola follows Kari, Kari’s instance will start sharing Karis statuses with Ola’s instance, so that Ola and other users of his instance can find Kari’s statuses and follow her. This is how social networks form between users and instances.

 

Thus, there is no instance you can register on to follow everything that happens in the network. This is actually an advantage. You don’t drown in the activity of millions of users, and actually get your voice heard.

 

I would highly recommend you to try Mastodon. Really try it. Put away the other social media for a bit, sign up on an instance, be nice and try to reach out to people. I promise you that it will work this time!

 

snabeltann.no is an instance that I run. It’s the biggest one in Norway and has about 70 users, and this figure is rising by the hour. Operation and management of this instance will soon be taken over by a society we intend to charter. This is to ensure the future of the instance, and give users more power.