One of the other alternatives to Twitter is Mastodon. It had been suggested that joining mastodon.social was the best server to subscribe to. I didn’t have an account so I hit ‘create account’ on the Mastodon website and a dialogue box came up saying that creating an account on mastodon.social was not possible. So, I was forced to hit ‘find another server’. This takes you to another page, and you hit ‘servers’ and it takes you to a list of many servers, most of which are not in English. At the side of that page is a list of regions. Selecting Oceania delivers a list of no servers. So, I went to ‘Europe’ and chose mastodon.online and it took me to the mastodon.online server. So, I presumed I had to hit ‘create account’ again, which I did. It then came up with a page listing ‘some ground rules’ which were just the usual stuff no bigotry, incitement, harm etc. I signed up as Blotreport and got a confirmation e-mail, eventually (the email arrived over four hours after signing up). This e-mail is to verify your e-mail address. Doing so takes you to your ‘Home’ site. I sent a couple of messages but had no idea if they went anywhere at all. My Home site simply said that my home feed was “Loading… Your home feed is being prepared”.
Some seven hours after the verification e-mail arrived, I received another e-mail ‘Welcome to Mastodon’. It had a subheading of “Here are some tips to get you started”. Below this was a ‘setup profile’ button. This I did which includes your bio and any images you may want to include as a header or an avatar. The other button was ‘Start posting’. This I also did. I also checked out my ‘Home’ site which had, by this time, been updated to show my ‘toots’ and some from the people and organisations which I followed (as had been suggested to me). However, beyond that I am completely in the dark, and expect it will take quite a bit of time for me to come to grips with the look and feel of the platform and how it works. It is very different to Tribel, which seems much more like Twitter than does Mastodon.
Despite not finding an Oceania server, it turns out there is one (‘aus.social’), but it seems I simply couldn’t find it at the time (why, I don’t know). However, that should not be a problem, as all the Mastodon servers talk to each other. Currently, I am not quite sure how to find anyone to follow or interact with. This may take some time.
On the tips site, it tells you how to go to another server and transfer all your data over. However, to do that you need to set up another account in the other server, and then transfer all your data to it, for which it doesn’t have detailed instructions. I set up the new account at about 9:30 and the verification e-mail arrived a couple of hours later. I clicked the button and the welcome to Mastodon email arrived a few minutes later. Again, I went through the profile setup and then started looking on Mastodon for other ‘Twitter regugees’ and found quite a few. This is still an ongoing project. I am still learning.
