Sharing advice and assisting with the great Mastodon migration

11 min readNov 8, 2022

Mastodon: @mastodonmigration@mastodon.online
Birdsite: https://twitter.com/MastodonMigrate

Sections:
Current News
Quick Start Tips
Cool Features: Lists, Filters and Followed Hashtags
Post Images Like a Pro — Solving the Image Posting Puzzle
Threading and Pinning
Help and Guidance
Tools
User Lists
Server Lists
News Archive

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Current News

Moved to: #MastodonNews Archive

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Quick Start Tips

So you want to join the great migration? Great!

Mastodon is like Twitter, but it’s not owned by anyone, which is really good!

Just click ‘Create account’ on any good quality server…
universeodon.com, mstdn.social, and mas.to are good choices

Many more are listed here >>> Mastodon Quick Scan Instance List …just follow the About link and then Create account. It’s that easy.

It’s not complicated. You join one server, but see postings from all the servers. It’s one big social network, same as Twitter. IT REALLY DOESN’T MATTER which server you join. Just create an account and get started.

So you’ve joined Mastodon, what next? Just play around. You are a Twitter user, so it will be pretty familiar. Click on # Explore on the right pane and enter a hashtag like #Astronomy. If you see a post you like Follow the user.

You will want to set up your profile and make any preference changes:
Preferences >> Profile. Put hashtags (eg. #astronomy) in your bio!!!
Preferences >> Site Theme >> Mastodon (Light) if you prefer a light theme.

Let your Twitter friends know you are here: Put your new Mastodon address and the URL in your Twitter bio:
@ [username] @ [mastodon server]
https://[mastodon server]/@[user name]

Introduce yourself. Post a message on Mastodon like:
#introduction #twittermigration #mastodonmigration
Hi, I am joining the great migration.
[Something about yourself and your interests]
[List of hashtags eg. #astronomy #socialmedia #technology #art #news]

If you want to receive regular news, advice and migration status updates then Follow mastodonmigration@mastodon.online. Feel free to unfollow if it is just too much.

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Cool Features: Lists, Filters and Followed Hashtags

Here are three amazing easy things you can do with Mastodon: Lists, Filters and Followed Hashtags.

Your Home feed shows posts from all the accounts you follow. With Lists you can also construct other feeds comprising a subset of accounts you follow. With Filters you can hide posts containing keywords or phrases. With Followed Hashtags all posts containing a hashtag will also be shown in your Home feed.

Lists: Construct feeds comprising a subset of accounts you follow.
Lists >>> Enter [New list title] >>> Click “+” on right >>> Click [New list title] below >>> Click [Show settings icon] on right >>> Click “Edit list” >>> Enter [@name@server] in “Search among people you follow” >>> Click Enter >>> Click “+” next to returned followed user >>> Repeat for all members of the list >>> Esc out
Now there’s tab that shows all new posts from members of the list.

Filters: Hide posts containing specified keywords or phrases from your Home feed.
Preferences >>> Click Filters on left >>> Click Add new filter >>> Fill in Title >>> Select Filter contexts >>> Select Filter action >>> enter Keyword or phrase >>> click Add keyword >>> Repeat for additional keywords >>> Click SAVE NEW FILTER
Now your home feed will be filtered and posts containing the Keywords will be either hidden with a warning or hidden completely.

Followed Hashtags: Add all posts containing the hashtag to your Home feed.
# Explore >>> Enter #[Hashtag] in Search or paste URL >>> Enter >>> Click hashtag from list below >>> Click Follow hashtag icon (little man with a +) on the right
Now your Home feed will also include any posts containing that hashtag.

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Post Images Like a Pro — Solving the Image Posting Puzzle

What’s going on with images? Sometimes you can’t see the top. Sometimes you can’t see the sides. You can’t read the text. Is this broken?

So often images look like this. Why are the left and right sides cut off?

Once you understand a few simple tricks you can greatly improve the way others see your posts. Bear with it here. This is, after all, a puzzle.

The number one thing to understand is that Mastodon has TWO WAYS of displaying images 16:9 Cropped and Full Image. By default 16:9 Cropped images are displayed for unexpanded timelines. So, when you are reading down someone’s home profile you see cropped images…maybe. Cropping is only done in unexpanded posts. Cropping only is done in the web browser. Apps and mobile interfaces always show Full Images. Grrrrr.

To make things more complicated you can disable cropping in Preferences. (Highly recommended!) If you uncheck the box you will always see Full Images, but be aware that because 16:9 Cropped Images are the default, cropping is what most others will see.

Uncheck the box for image cropping in Preferences

“I use the app, why should I care about all of this?”

Again, you should care because other users see 16:9 Cropped images and they will see your pictures cropped. Bottom line, you want your images to look good when they are cropped, so understanding 16:9 Cropping is a good idea.

Why do they do this? Seriously, why?

The advantage of cropping is the unexpanded timeline is more compressed. If someone has lots of portrait oriented (taller than wide) images then Full Images take up more vertical space.

Think it’s worth it? Keep the default. Tired of seeing unintelligible images? Uncheck the box.

So, let’s solve the puzzle. How do you post images so 16:9 Cropped versions will look good too? Well, it is called 16:9 Cropped because Mastodon is going to chop, squash and stretch the image into a 16:9 landscape (wider than tall) derivation. But…

IF YOU POST A 16:9 IMAGE, THE CROPPED AND FULL IMAGE VERSIONS WILL BE THE SAME.

So, you can stop right now, Just post 16:9 landscape images. However, if you want a few more tricks, read on…

Trick 1: Changing the 16:9 Focus Point.

After you upload an image you can hit the Edit button in the top right. This Edit Media popup is where you add Alt-Text (You should always add Alt-Text for the visually impaired), and you can also change the Focus Point of the 16:9 Cropped version.

What? Just try it. Upload a portrait image and move the circle thing around. The bottom right box shows what your 16:9 version will look like.

How to move the focus point around in the media edit popup.

If you post a 16:9 landscape image the 16:9 Cropped and Full Image versions will be the same. So, if you embed your image in a 16:9 frame problem solved, right?

Yes!

It’s a bit of work, but you can use a paint program to paste your image into a 16:9 white background. It’s very convenient to set up 800 x 450, 1600 x 900 and 2000 x 1125 frames as blank templates to past images into.

Paste a non-16:9 image into a 16:9 aspect ratio white background frame

Still there? The most annoying thing about all this cropping stuff is that it can make reading text based images impossible without expanding the image or the entire post. This means more clicks for your reader.

Long text images have the tops and bottoms cut off. The easy fix is to just change the focus point to the top, so your reader can at least begin to read the piece.

Move the focus point to the top for long text images in the Media Edit popup.

Short text images are the worst. The text gets strangely zoomed in and clipped off on the sides making them impossible to read and just plain ugly. Just pop the snip into a paint program, pull the bottom down to create a 16:9 aspect image with whitespace on the bottom, save it and post it.

Use a paint program to pull down the bottom of a short text snippet adding whitespace to make it 16:9

So, that’s it. Thanks for sticking it out. You are now a Mastodon image posting pro!

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Threading and Pinning

While different, threading in Mastodon is actually pretty good. People are familiar with Twitter threads that link one post to the next in chronological order. You can do this on Mastodon too, but it’s a little less polished.

On Mastodon threads are created simply by REPLYING TO THE PREVIOUS POST in the thread. When your first post is expanded, every subsequent reply by the author (you) is added below your previous reply, making the thread very readable. If anyone expands the top post, what they see is ALL YOUR POSTS FIRST, no matter who else has replied to any post in the thread. It is kind of a natural thread.

Pro tip: After the first post, change the post privacy (small world icon) to unlisted so you don’t deluge your followers with notifications.

Once you are done composing the thread, you can Pin the first post of the thread, and it goes to the very top of your profile page. In Mastodon, you get five (5) pinned posts, so you can curate your profile page by pinning posts that you want to appear at the top.

You can alternatively Boost the first post, and it will go to the top of the page, but below your pinned posts.

If people reply to any post in the thread, that’s OK. Their posts will still go below all of the posts in your thread. In fact, if you add to your thread later (by replying to the last post in the thread) that post will still slot in above the other replies. In this way you can extend your thread whenever you want. You are in charge.

So now for the ugly. When you compose your thread each subsequent post goes ON TOP OF the last post in your profile page timeline. So, your thread is listed on the profile page in reverse order from the way you want it. This is why it is a good idea to Pin or Boost the first post of the thread, to get it to the top.

If you want to really get tricky, you can Boost each post of the thread in reverse order (last to first), and the posts will now show up under your pinned posts in the correct thread order, however the original posts will still be in reverse order further down the timeline.

You can move Pins around by unpinning then repinning a post to move it to the top. Same with unboosting and reboosting, but be aware that you generate notifications to your followers whenever you Boost.

So, in conclusion, threads in Mastodon work very well, but they kind of make a mess of your profile page timeline. This can be dealt with by Pinning or Boosting the top post of the thread. Think about using Pins and Boosts to curate the top of your profile page while letting the original posts further down just fade away.

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Help and Guidance

Getting Started
Quick Start Tips

Control Alt Delete Blog: The Mastodon’s Guide to the Fediverse

Odin Halvorson: The Compassionate User’s Guide to Mastodon

DavidB: The Great Twitter Migration to Mastodon

BuzzMachine: On Joining Mastodon

Adam Fields: A brief introduction to Mastodon

Robb Montgomery: Mastodon - A Quick Start Guide for Journalists

Gizmodo: How to Join Mastodon, the Ad-Free Social Network Billionaires Can’t Buy

digitaltrends: How to use Mastodon: create your account, join servers, and more

Electronic Frontier Foundation: How to Make a Mastodon Account and Join the Fediverse (includes step by step 2FA and Verification)

Avoid The Hack: Switching From Twitter to Mastodon

ZDNET: Ditching Twitter? How to get started with Mastodon

Maya.land: MASTODON still a work in progress

Clive Thompson: Come Join Me On Mastodon, Folks

CNET: How to Join Mastodon, the Open-Source Twitter Replacement

ZDNet: Ditching Twitter? How to get started with Mastodon

TechCrunch: A beginner’s guide to Mastodon, the open source Twitter alternative

The Explorographer: How to Mastodon — The New Social Media (YouTube 8 minutes)

A Better Computer: Getting Started, A super quick guide to Mastodon (YouTube 12 minutes)

General Overviews, Help and Guidance

Mastodon: Mastodon Help

FediTips: An Unofficial Guide to Mastodon

Joyeusenoelle: An Increasingly Less Brief Guide to Mastodon

A non-computer-person’s guide to how Mastodon instances work

Mastodon: Thoughts on Twitter, Mastodon, and owning your data

Nikodemus: Nikodemus’ Guide to Mastodon

Elilla & Friends: A futuristic guide to Mastodon for 2021

Mastodon 101 with Professor Jeff Jarvis

Danielle Navarro: Notes from a data witch

Miguel Gulin: #Tootorials Roundup:#Mastodon #TwitterMigration #Fediverse

Special Topics

Cool Features: Lists, Filters and Followed Hashtags

Post Images Like a Pro — Solving the Image Posting Puzzle

Threading and Pinning

Anthony Dean: How to find Mastodon users; also, recommended Mastodon accounts to follow

Mastodon: Setting up your profile

Wired: How to Find Your Twitter Friends on Mastodon

Swapna Krishna: What to Do Once You’re on Mastodon (and what not to do)

David Barr: Add a verified website to your Mastodon account

David August How To: Leave Twitter, Find Twitter People On Mastodon, Cross-Post

Screen Rant: How To Change Servers On Mastodon (And When You Should)

Opensource: 4 key differences between Twitter and Mastodon

SelfAwarePatterns: The Mastodon experience at one week

EscapingTech: A Twitter User’s Guide to Mastodon

TechRadar: Sick of Twitter? You need to check out these two Mastodon apps

Axbom: 10 Quick Mastodon Tips

SOCIAL.COOP WIKI: HOW TO MAKE THE FEDIVERSE YOUR OWN

Jan van den Berg: How to get green links on your Mastodon profile with WordPress

techdirt: Some Tricks To Making Mastodon Way More Useful

Technical/Systems Administration

Itay Podhajcer: Simple Mastodon Node Deployment on Azure

Kris Nóva: Leaving the Basement

Warski: The architecture of Mastodon

InfoWorld: Full-text search your own Mastodon posts with R

Tech Policy Press: How To Open An Outpost In Social Media Exile

Rixx.de: On Running a Mastodon Instance

Leahs Gedanken: Scaling the Mastodon

Mastohost: RE: Mastodon media storage

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Tools

Followgraph for Mastodon — This tool allows you to expand your connection graph and find new people to follow. It works by looking up your (or any other) account’s “follows’ follows”.

tweepsmap — Compose once in a slick editor then publish to both the birdsite and Mastodon. Now supports threading

tweetbeaver — A Swiss Army Knife for digging out data from the birdsite

twitter-archive-parser — Make sense out of your archived birdsite data

Movetodon — Find your friends on Mastodon

Debirdifier — This website allows you to search the people you follow on Twitter for possible Mastodon/Fediverse accounts.

Fedifinder — Extract the fediverse handles of your Twitter followings or list members and import them on Mastodon to follow them all at once.

Twitodon — Find and follow your Twitter friends on Mastodon.

Fediverse directory

Crossposter — Connect a Mastodon account and a Twitter account and enable cross-posting between them.

Moa Bridge — Link your Mastodon account to Twitter

AuthChirp — Aiding small Mastodon instance admins by tracking larger instances’ server blocklists

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