Malsasa

linux

Mastodon, Mastodon, Mastodon, what is Mastodon anyway? It is a social network, but unlike Facebook and likes, it's social against other social networks. For me seeking free software and privacy respecting social network which is huge, Mastodon is a match. Let me share my experience with you.

I Found My Community

I love to find people who are supportive to software freedom. People call them with many names, Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) community is among the name. First, I found Mastodon instance that is straightforward to what I am looking for, it is named FLOSS.social. This becomes my identity as my Mastodon handle is ademalsasa@floss.social. Second, I can be friend with people I already knew on other places, such as KDE and Ubuntu, and the users, and the developers. So easily I can follow people I in my own field want to know about. Third, I can speak freely to them and they even replied and retoot me. You know, even the Mastodon owner (read: my instance admin) replied to me and Mastodon creator (@Chocobozz) and Framasoft themselves (@Framasoft) retoot me as well. These are what I am looking for up to today which I cannot find even with Reddit. To achieve all this, I do not need to sacrifice my freedom (facebook) nor deny federation (twitter) as I got them all with this free software free society social network, Mastodon. I believe if you love FLOSS you will love to join Mastodon. I am satisfied I found my community.

Hashtags are closer to my own field! I can find trending keywords like #ubuntu, #foss, #linux, even #gnu within Mastodon I hardly find on Twitter. This adds the feelings at home here.

I Share Freely

Mastodon has superb sharing features. In Twitter it is called tweet, here it is called toot. It is good to see 500 characters per toot, public/private choice, and followers only visibility. The ultimate thing is, by one toot your message reaches multiple different social networks.

Resharing in Twitter is to retweet – retweeted – retweeting, in Mastodon it is to boost – boosted – boosting. Personally, I do boost far more often here than in Twitter or even Reddit. Perhaps it's because Mastodon is still young I got the feelings that “nobody knows me” different to when I use Facebook or Twitter and I enjoy that a lot.

As example I display here some of my precious Mastodon toots. I have five toots which got nice reactions from Mastodon users.

(Code Hostings) (Writer Guide) (PeerTube Guide) (Help Quit GitHub) (BigBlueButton Guide)

I Have Fun

Our free software community is fun. Even seeing the domain names is already amusing. You see, my instance is FLOSS.social, and there is another instance named FOSStodon.org, and FOSSdaily.xyz, and everything else. I have fun seeing people care a lot about free software that I care about.

I Experience Things Nowhere to Find

It is the federation. Federation is internet, it takes back control to the hand of internet users once again. Unlike Facebook alikes, my new social network is social as I said, it is integrated to other social networks. If you have little computing knowledge, you will know every visitable item in internet is hosted on an individual computer machine called server. Now, Facebook server is not conneted to Twitter server, but Mastodon servers are interconnected with each other, and Mastodon is connected to PeerTube, Pixelfed, and other amazing social networks. For example, in Mastodon I speak freely with Dr. Roy of Techrights.org although he is actually not using Mastodon and this is impossible with Facebook.

My Messages