After Elon Musk announced its interest in acquiring twitter and even more now that he did it, there has been a growing influx of people to Mastodon, a decentralized social media platform inspired by twitter but in some sense further influenced by forums and emails.

There are a few tools and suggestions that have been shared around recently, and I thought of blogging them here to save them. The culture on Mastodon is quite different and more thoughtful than the one in Twitter. It takes a bit of getting used to it and what to do or avoid. Overall it makes it a much more pleasant experience (in my opinion).

Let’s get to the mian resources:

• A Brief Mastodon Guide for Social Media Worriers is really brief. The section Writing your First Toot contains the essence of the community care to take into account when posting.
• An Increasingly Less-Brief Guide to Mastodon contains some useful FAQs.
• Fedi Tips is an unofficial guide to mastodon and the fediverse, contains a whole lot of information if you get really into it.
• • Everything I know about mastodon by Danielle Navarro contains a fairly detailed introduction to mastodon, including a step by step tutorial on the main features.

When moving from twitter it is often convenient to keep some sort of bridge between the two, I am using Moa and it is working very well.

The decentralization makes it so that you have many instances to choose from to create an account. In the end it does not really matter what you chose, since they all talk to each other pretty seamlessly. For example, I had an account on mastodon.social from a number of years ago and I recently moved it to mathstodon.xyz. There is really no particular reason, besides the high amount of mathematicians on mathstodon and a name I find particularly cool.

Some lists of people per category are found on communitywiki and fediverse.info. I still find it nicer to find them randomly stumbling on some tagged post or from the federated timelines.

Update: noise keeps growing, there is agrowing number of articles and orimers on mainstream medias, like the mastodon primer by gizmodo and the artcile on mashable. And with this the number of interesting instances is growing. I srat hoping I can get rid of twitter soon!