On the Fediverse, the microblogs (Mastodon, its forks, Misskey, its forks, etc.) lack a group functionality. Since tagged posts generally only federate to servers who already receive posts from the originating server, a lot can be missed. Groups offer a bypass. If I follow ActuallyAutistic, it doesn't matter whether anyone on my server follows your server or not. When you @ ActuallyAutistic, I'll see your post.
While they weren't the only group host, a.gup.pe was the main one that people were using to host groups. This had issues because the software that a.gup.pe ran on didn't play well with non-Mastodon microblogs. Sometimes it would work with non-microblog platforms on the Fediverse but it was kind of spotty.
a.gup.pe, the flagship instance for Guppe, went down recently because the policy for .pe domains allows others to buy the domains out from under the owners during a window leading up to the domain expiration.
This serves as a primer about Group functionality. It also covers serious issues with our current options.
Mastodon folks are often unaware of the different types of software federating over the Activity Pub protocol. It's not just Microblogs emulating what Twitter was. One of the areas is Discussion Forums like Reddit but federated. This includes Lemmy and Kbin. Because the focus isn't on microblogging, these platforms can offer feature sets that are beneficial for more nuanced discussion. What you may not know is that you can interact with discussions on federated discussion forums from your Mastodon account.
This isn't a comprehensive guide. It's not intended to be one. It's just some basics you need to get started with a bit of an explanation as to why you'd want to.
This is a breakdown of the current status / usability / display quality of Markdown formatted posts (from Glitch ) on various desktop and Fediverse apps connected to Vanilla Mastodon instances.
I'm not sure whether folks will find this useful. Twitter didn't have bookmarks when I was using it. It's possible I'm late to the game and everyone except me already knows how to make good use of bookmarks. That said, here's how I'm using bookmarks on Mastodon. It's not “the right way” but you could find it useful.
