Moonbeam.town Wiki

Mastodon is a social media platform that has many features in common with Twitter, most notably low character limits. It makes use of the ActivityPub protocol and is able to interact with any other services that uses that protocol. It is the most popular of the many options for accessing the Fediverse.

As I said, it's basically Twitter – you can post short messages, pictures, and videos about your life, and follow other people who are all doing the same thing.

A lot of people have written a lot about Mastodon – you can visit https://joinmastodon.org and https://mastodon.help/ if you'd like to learn more.

There are a number of ways to get started with Mastodon on Moonbeam.town – for one, the domain itself points to our Mastodon instance. You can also access it from your control panel or by using a client app, such as Tusky for Android or Amarok for iOS.

In all cases, your login info will be as follows:

• Server: moonbeam.town
• Username: The username you use to log into your control panel
• Password: The same password you use for your control panel login

When you first log in, you'll be presented with the default interface, a Twitter-like monolithic timeline. This timeline will be empty, because you aren't following anyone! This is your “Home” timeline, which is the “Twitter” option, i.e. everyone you, personally, follow. So the first thing you should do is follow some people!

Of course, you'll need to find them first. One easy thing to do is add your townies – @wraidd@moonbeam.town, @jack@sagephoenix.org are my two accounts. Enter them into the search box and my profiles should come up.

Next, switch to the “Local” tab. This tab is all the toots from everyone on our server, so that's an easy way to find people.

Then there's the “Federated” tab. Nobody seems too clear on exactly how the Federated tab works – the most common explanation I've seen is “it's all the people you follow plus all the people they follow,” and even if that's wrong that's close enough. There's also the “Profile Directory,” which displays the people who have been active recently on the Federated network.

Finally, there's the Mastodon Trunk, an opt-in list of lists of users, sorted by topic. Adding people from the Trunk is a bit tedious, but at least you only have to do it once.

Between these sources you should be able to find plenty of interesting people to get you started. Just make sure you read profiles first, and respect people's boundaries. One of the reasons I like Mastodon better than Twitter is that it's marginally less toxic, but that takes everyone to maintain.

Something else you should do early on is edit your profile and upload an avatar. No-face accounts are looked at with suspicion and I don't want the server to develop a reputation.

Because this is a new instance, the block lists aren't properly populated yet. If you see someone on the public timelines posting bigoted or Nazi shit, let me know and I'll get it taken care of.

At the moment, the Federated timeline will be populated basically by the people I follow. As you all use the service and follow more people, the Federated timeline will get more interesting and diverse.