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

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techcrunch.com/2026/01/01/what-is-mastodon/

Unless if you’re really in the know about nascent platforms, you probably didn’t know what Mastodon was until Elon Musk bought Twitter and renamed it X. In the initial aftermath of the acquisition, as users fretted over what direction Twitter would take, millions of users hopped over to Mastodon, a fellow microblogging site. As time went on, users would also try out Bluesky, or Instagram’s Threads app — but because Mastodon was founded in 2016, it had years to develop its own identity as more than just an alternate Twitter.

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Comments in Technology@piefed.social

Is there an “intermediate” guide that covers how to fine tune your home feed? I don’t get how to follow / mute / block / filter very well yet.

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Masto has 3 feeds
Federated: everyone your server knows (public posts)
Local: people on your server only (public posts)
Home: All posts from people you follow
There is not algoryhthm for feeds, just chronological order.

Check Federated and Local feeds for new people. Click on their profile and follow/mute/etc as you want

Also, search hashtags you are interesed in and try the same of federated and local

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Not OP, but which is which on the official Android app?

I’m guessing Home is who I follow, Live Feed is local and the Explore tab is federated. Is that correct?

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I haven’t used the official app, but I think Live Feed has a toggle for Local and Federated

Explore show popular hashtags, posts of your instance afaik

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the artist did a fantastic job portraying an extremely approachable mastodon

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Comments in Fediverse@lemmy.world

TechCrunch has that article tagged as “evergreens”, which I think is their code for “we can probably get away with reposting this later and pretending it’s brand new.”

Case in point, this article was published in 2023.

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OP

Uh, that link takes me to a *Page Not Found. Whoops!* page, although, immediately after arriving, I do get a very quick flash of the article.

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Me, too. I don’t know why. I assume TechCrunch deleted the 2003 article, but that shouldn’t impact a snapshot.

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