Regarding Posts

You will have noticed by now the text box in the upper left of the web interface. This is where you compose your toots. But before you shoot off your first pearl of wisdom into the Fediverse, notice how Mastodon differs (Figure 4) from other platforms.

Figure 4: Parts of the tooting form.

First, you have 500 characters for your message, which, well, is nice. Notice along the bottom of the main text area, and from left to right, is a toolbar with five buttons. The first button shows the universal visual symbol for attachments: a paperclip. The paperclip is, of course, for attaching files to your toots. You can also just drag and drop a file onto the web client. Mastodon allows up to four images or one audio/video file per toot.

Note that accessibility is very important for the Mastodon community, so you are highly encouraged to add alt (alternative) text to the images you attach. Indeed, many servers surround images that do not do this with a red and yellow warning border. Others are more aggressive and directly forbid posting media without descriptions or have a bot remove them. So, when you attach your media, click on the No description added label in the attachment itself and a new window will open (Figure 5). In this window you will be able to add text of up to 1,500 characters.

Figure 5: Adding alt text to an image.

The next button is for polls and does what you would expect.

The button with a globe is for the privacy level of the toot. The privacy levels are self-explanatory, but bear in mind that the Mentioned people only option, that is, a direct message to other users, is not very private. Messages in Mastodon are not encrypted, so do not use it to send private or sensitive information.

And another etiquette note here: When you want to create a thread (a series of interconnected toots), the done thing is to make the first one Public, and the follow-up toots Unlisted. That means that anybody who wants to read the thread can just click on the top, public toot and see all the other threaded toots, but people who are not interested will only see the first toot and you won't clutter up their feed. This also applies to when you answer a toot: The polite thing to do is send your reply as unlisted.

The CW button is also something unique to Mastodon. CW stands for "content warning" and splits the text field into two. If you are posting content that could show something disagreeable or distressing to the rest of the world, you indicate the fact here, in the content warning text box. The rest of the toot will then be hidden and images and videos blurred (Figure 6). A user who wants to read the rest will be given a button to press.

Figure 6: A toot with a content warning.

A less-than-obvious real-life example is that a lot of people on Mastodon have grown a bit tired of all the mentions of Twitter, so a warning with the words "Birdsite Rant" will tell those people that they should skip this one.

Again, it is a Mastodon thing to use this feature generously to avoid spoiling the day (or wasting the time) of fellow users.

Verifying

Your tooting prowess will eventually build up your following. But with fame also comes envy! And with envy comes identity theft, or at least someone trying to pass off as you. Notice that, if you are using @JaneDoe on one server, for example, someone can create the account @JaneDoe on another server and try and mislead your followers [6].

However, Mastodon implements an ingenious workaround that lets you verify your identity to your followers. It has nothing to do with colored ticks, because you use your website.

Visit Preferences (gear icon at the top of the web client screen) and then Profile | Appearance. You will see a section labeled Profile metadata. You can put anything in there, but most users use it to provide information such as links to their blogs, websites, Patreons, and so on. Use one of the rows to write in the URL of the front page of your website or blog (Figure 7).

Figure 7: Add your website or blog to your profile to verify the authenticity of your account.

Under Verification, to the right of Profile metadata, you will see a string of HTML. Use the Copy button to copy it to the clipboard, and open your web page for editing. Insert the string in the <header> ... </header> section of your page.

(For WordPress, you can try a plugin such as WPCode [7]. WPCode allows you to insert snippets into different parts of your blog. Once installed, it adds a new entry to the sidebar: Code Snippets. Click on that entry and choose the Header & Footer submenu.)

Save your changes on your website, and, after a few minutes, the links on your profile will show up in green with a green tick (Figure 8), verifying you as the owner of both the linked site and the Mastodon account.

Figure 8: A verified account.

Interoperability

One of the great aspects of Mastodon is how well it plays nice with the rest of the Fediverse. Take for example Pixelfed [8], a Fediverse service for sharing photos, somewhat akin to Instagram. Look at the name of the accounts and you will notice that they follow the same format as in Mastodon: @@.

This means you can follow a Pixelfed account from Mastodon (and vice versa) (Figure 9), and every time your favorite photographer posts an image, it will show up in your Mastodon feed (see the article on Pixelfed elsewhere in this issue). Posts you boost and like from Mastodon will be boosted and liked in Pixelfed too. If you send a reply to a post, it will show up as a comment in Pixelfed.

Figure 9: A Pixelfed feed viewed from Mastodon.

Likewise, you can follow a Mastodon account from Pixelfed, and every time that account posts a toot with an image, it will show up in Pixelfed.

It is the same for PeerTube [9], the Fediverse's service for sharing videos (also covered elsewhere in this issue): Follow a PeerTube account from Mastodon, and new videos will appear in your feed, and you can watch, boost, like, and comment on them without ever leaving Mastodon.