A storm of references to Mastodon – an open-source social networking service took over on Twitter India in the first week of November after senior Supreme Court lawyer Sanjay Hegde’ account on the microblogging site got suspended.
Mr Hegde after he was informed that his account will not be restored, in interviews to media outlets said that he is thinking of joining nother social media platforms like Mastadon. This began a trend of people joining Mastodon in solidarity with Mr Hegde.
Let us dive into what actually is Mastodon and how can one create an account on the social networking site.
What is Mastodon?
Mastodon is a free and open-source social networking service. Which allows users to host their own server node in the network, and its various separately operated user bases are federated across many different servers. These servers are connected as a federated social network, allowing users from different servers to interact with each other.
“Mastodon isn’t just a website, it is a federation – think Star Trek. Thousands of independent communities running Mastodon form a coherent network, where while every planet is different, being part of one is being part of the whole,” the homepage of the website reads.
According to the product’s website, ” Mastodon comes with effective anti-abuse tools to help protect yourself.”
How to create account on Mastodon?
- Mastadon is a federated service more akin to email. Mastodon lets you sign up one of many sites that run under Mastodon software, called instances. Any user can communicate with the software users on different instances.
- A good place to start is by going through Mastodon.social/about. This is the flagship instance for the service and has the most users. A whole list of other instances can be checked out at JoinMastodon.org.
- Signup is usual, with the aid of username, email address, and password. The full username at the website is formated as @[Username]@[MastodonInstance.Domain]
- The default look for Mastodon is called Tootsuite, and it looks similar to Tweetdeck. There is a 500 character limit (varies across instances) for each Toot. When you’re ready to send, just click the Toot button.
- You can add an image by clicking the camera icon, pasting an image from your clipboard, or click and dragging a photo over the page. When an image is added, you can add a description for the visually impaired. There is an eyeball icon to mark the image as NSFW.
