Teaching Mastodon Through Practical Interactions

About a year and a half ago, I left legacy social media behind for self-hosted Mastodon and PeerTube servers. This was a medium tricky endeavor, given I had functionally zero tech experience. Technology, for me, had been very straightforward up until then relative to the wonkiness that is the Fediverse.

I'm something of a D-List “influencer”, I think is what people call it? I don't consider it my career or anything, but I do have some 70,000 followers on my YouTube, around 30,000 on my Instagram before it got nuked, I think, and also my art and writing get millions of views each year if you count all the places it gets shared and reposted.

I basically told all my followers, “Hey, if you wanna see more stuff from me, go to Mastodon! I am literally not going to be posting elsewhere anymore.”

And that worked, surprisingly! Not a lot, but across the last year and a half, I think I've helped move 500 - 700 followers with me onto Fedi. Most of them I've steered towards Mastodon Social for simplicity's sake, but some non-zero have joined smaller, niche servers. That's the roughest count based on a quick scroll through my profile for accounts made since I joined with near-zero followers and for whom I appear to be their first follow.

I'm very proud of this. I'm proud of both my followers for making such a relatively complicated decision and myself for making content anyone on this planet thinks is worth going through that hassle for.

But I've also heard a lot of complaints about things not making sense. What does X feature mean, or how do you do Y function that was super intuitive on old social media but not at all on federated social media? And soon, I found myself taking on this educator responsibility of sorts.

I taught my followers how the Private Mention feature on Mastodon works by asking them if anyone wanted private, exclusive content from me. Those who said yes got added to a list of people I direct message stuff to every month or so. Instead of linking to a video or documentation, I directly interacted with followers through this feature they might not have previously understood.

Here's an early example of me doing this. I actually get replies on these, and it is very exciting going through the replies and seeing followers get the hang of how tagging people and removing tags worked on Mastodon, too.

I also try to regularly make posts with marked sensitive media and content warnings. These are unique features not on most legacy social media, and I think it's vital that someone who might have just joined Mastodon on my behalf, for whom I might be their only follow, sees and understands how these features work. More importantly, I think it's vital for newcomers to Mastodon to see its rules at work.

There were some misconceptions earlier on, which I can best summarize as a misunderstanding around, “If Lety complained about her content getting blocked due to dumb rules on legacy social media, and then she switched to Mastodon, that must mean there are fewer rules to follow here.“

There broadly are fewer rules on Mastodon. That much is clear looking at the six rules on Mastodon Social's About page instead of the countless pages of legalese one accepts upon making a Meta account.

The torrential bullshit of policies forced upon the masses by corpo social media has created something of a malicious compliance culture in online spaces. Clever euphemisms to work around discussing prohibited topics on TikTok, streamers studying content guidelines like it is the bar exam to find the boundaries of what exactly they're allowed to wear-- when fundamental freedoms are against the Terms of Service, the Service begins to be seen as the enemy.

And why not waste the time of a billion-dollar company? Skirting around its rules to the maximum extent and just remaking accounts if you get banned.

But billionaires do not run the Fediverse. That the Fediverse has laxer restrictions and better-protected freedoms of speech is because Fedi is built on the hard work of charitable individuals who go out of their way to host personal infrastructure for the use of many. Without ads and VC funding, the only price many Fedi admins charge is a list of rules to follow and existing cultures on how to follow these rules best.

Mastodon servers often do have fewer rules, but each rule is more important than their counterparts on legacy social media because the rules are what make each individual instance possible.

I run my own personal instance and am technically able to draft and follow any set of rules I want. But as someone who's directed literally hundreds of new users to Mastodon Social, whose followers might view them as the foremost example of how to conduct themselves, I chose to adopt their rules and do my best to actively engage with and promote adherence to them.

All that said, the most challenging concept I've had to communicate is how federation itself works, specifically cross-platform federation.

I'm in large part known for making videos, and my video audience is, for the most part, who I've managed to drag onto Fedi. But interacting with videos on PeerTube is confusing to legacy social media users. To interact with my PeerTube videos, they must do so from another platform entirely, like Mastodon Social, and I lose a lot of people at this disconnect.

What I've had the most success with bridging that knowledge gap is through explainer posts like these.

This explainer post appears as a comment under every single video on PeerTube and as a reply to each video status under my PeerTube account on Mastodon, wherever that account has followers.

I've changed and updated the wording over time with feedback from followers about how they've come to get a feel for Fedi and what the onboarding process was like, and I think I'm on the fifth iteration of this wording now. I've learned a lot myself, also, such as the importance of making these posts under Quiet Public visibility so that they don't hog up the global timeline and count towards global hashtag trends.

It has been tremendously helpful for prospective Mastodon users to see that comment on my PeerTube page, make an account on Mastodon Social or elsewhere, and then see that same reply here. Through some complex CSS trickery, I've even managed to hide some portions of this text on my PeerTube server. This allows me to have the same post direct people to Mastodon when seen on PeerTube and then further explain how to use their new Mastodon account to comment on my videos once they're here.

It practically bridges that gap of communicating “Oh, Twitter-style replies on Mastodon show up as YouTube-style comments on PeerTube" better than any amount of me talking about it elsewhere ever would.

The reply-to-video relationship also serves as a distinguisher that communicates, “Hey, this is my Mastodon account that I talk from, and the one I'm replying to that posted the video is my PeerTube account. These accounts serve different purposes.”

And of course, the “#LetyDoesPeerTubeExplainer” hashtag in each post also teaches my followers about Mastodon filters by giving them the practical use case of hiding these explainer comments on Mastodon if they're no longer needed.

Most of the text above is modified from a discussion on the joinmastodon.org Discord server. I just edited it and tossed it on this site I threw together real quick as some thought it contained useful information that they'd like to share.