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wembley

xancredible made a Twitter Exodus friending meme! H/t

pauraque.

ETA: A

twitter_refugees community! Lots of tips on how to use Dreamwidth. Tell your friends! H/t

conuly.

ETA2: More links about getting started on dreamwidth, by

vriddy.

ETA3: Another big resource post for folks leaving Twitter by

ysabetwordsmith.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

wembley

So Twitter is one gigantic island. You log in, you're on the island.

Mastodon is more like... an ocean that a bunch of islands of varying sizes float on. You pick an island -- aka an "instance" aka a "server" -- to serve as your home base. But you can follow people on other islands and see what they post!

Each island -- let's start calling them instances now so we can get comfortable with that lingo -- has its own admin with its own rules. Just like Livejournal communities or mailing lists back in the day. Or fanfic exchanges or art zines or Discord servers today. The moderator running a mailing list or LJ comm or fanfic exchange or Discord server makes the rules, right?

So on a Mastodon instance, instead of a gigantic corporation funded by venture capital run by a fascist-loving manbaby making the rules, it's just a regular-degular person funded by their own money + donations making the rules.

You don't have to pick a giant instance to live on! (Although you can if you want!) There are lots of little ones with lots of different themes and vibes. I'm on https://fandom.ink/ because it's against ship-bashing and kink-bashing and allows NSFW. There are other panfandom ones that have just started as well (I think fandom.garden and blorbo.social?) There's a Star Trek-themed one called tenforward.social (I think) and ones for queer techies and so on and so forth.

You can follow anyone on any instance though*!

Instead of being able to only look at one timeline, you have tabs that allow you to toggle between three timelines, if you want:

The Home timeline, where you see anyone you follow from any instance.

The Local timeline, where you see all the ~~tweets~~ toots (yes, they're called toots) just on your home instance.

The Federated timeline -- this is the one I find harder to understand/explain, but it's basically the Network page on Dreamwidth, aka the old Friendsfriends page from Livejournal -- basically, you're seeing toots by people followed by people you're following. I think. So the Federated timeline ends up being this giant gumbo of everything.

Here's a screenshot, on Firefox. It looks a lot like Twitter!

*There is an exception here: If your instance defederates -- aka blocks -- another instance, then you can't see any toots from there. Like, say there's an instance full of Nazis or something. If your instance blocks them, you won't see any toots from them, even if you or someone you follow has followed someone from there. Or maybe it keeps you from even following someone from there? Not sure. Federation itself and how it works is still kind of confusing to me.

Here is an explainer that is probably better than mine: https://medium.com/@jimpjorps/a-non-computer-persons-guide-to-how-mastodon-instances-work-da6ceac1994a

From:

king0fcrows

Hi, just trying to cast a net out and find other users/interesting fan work on dreamwidth, as I'm pretty new to the site.

I also followed you on mastadon--again not trying to be creepy, just trying to find relatively friendly people to follow so I'm not staring at a blank feed. (I am ALSO brand new at mastadon. Getting started on new sites it hard.)