Welcome to Hoosier.Social!
INTRODUCTION
What Is This?
This document is intended as a little bit of help for folks joining the Hoosier.Social community, and to explain how Mastodon and the Fediverse work to folks who are new to these concepts.
While Mastodon really is just about as easy to use as any other social media site, by design it doesn't force-feed you content. While I think that's one of its best features, it can also mean that it takes a little more care and feeding at first to find the stuff you want to see.
This guide is intended to be light and fun, but complete enough to get you started happily tooting and boosting to your heart’s content (more on what that nonsense means later).
This guide purposefully doesn’t cover everything about the topic - but focuses on essentials to get you started having fun. You’ll see yellow callouts (like this one) throughout. When you see one- know that the information in there is interesting but optional.
Do I Have To Read It All?
Heavens no. You can have a great experience without reading any of this. But if you feel a little lost, or aren’t sure how to start – you’ll find solid tips throughout.
If you're in a hurry, hop on over to our Quickstart Guide!
What is Hoosier.Social?
Hoosier.Social is a Mastodon instance for Indiana residents or Indiana topics. You can access Hoosier.Social through a web browser. You can also use the Mastodon mobile app on both iOS and Android.
Mastodon is a social media service. (I know there is a techy somewhere waving his finger about the word “service” but you can ignore Jeff. He’s always quibbling.)
In some ways, it’s very like other services. You can add friends. Share updates, photos, and other stuff. You can like and comment on things people share. You know – the usual.
Under the hood, Mastodon is very different from mainstream social media.
Most importantly, it’s not just one single website owned by one single company. Rather, it’s a collection of independently-run instances (servers) that can federate together so that people can follow one another across all these vibrant but independent communities!
Don’t worry, you aren’t alone. It’s a new concept and that can be intimidating. In practice you really can just dive in and use this thing without thinking about any of this.
Can’t help but sweat the details?
Think of it kinda like email. Any company, organization, group, and even many individuals have email services that can send emails to any other user of any other email service. Lots of people who use email don’t really understand how email works and that’s fine.
There are big email services like Gmail or Outlook that millions of people use. And there are tiny services like your weird cousin Jeff who has a personal server in his basement and keeps trying to get you to install Linux on your work laptop.
The point is, no one person owns the concept of “email.” When you don’t like your email service, it’s pretty straightforward to move to another.
Same-ish idea here.
This allows us to have online communities (that’s really all an instance is) that share common interests but who can still communicate with millions of other people everywhere. The whole universe of all these interconnected communities is called (dramatic music) The Fediverse.
The Fediverse is powered by a protocol called ActivityPub that allows all kinds of very different social media services to get along together. It’s really kinda neat. You don’t need to know anything about the details to enjoy the results but if you can’t help yourself there’s more on that here.
I sometimes enjoy calling it the “Federated Universe” because that sounds like something out of Star Trek.
JOINING THE COOL KIDS CLUB
Signing Up
If you're using a web browser to access this stuff, all you have to do is browse your fine self on over to Hoosier.Social and click the big, shiny blue Create account button. Follow the instructions, agree to some commonsense rules of behavior, and you're all done.
If you're using the official Mastodon app, just make sure you choose Pick another server and search for Hoosier.Social. It'll then guide you through the account creation process.
Display Name: This can be anything you like, and you can change it at any time. It appears next to your username on Mastodon and is intended to be a more human-readable way for your friends to identify you.
Username: This is a unique name to identify you on our server. No special characters are allowed except underscores (_). The username is added to our instance name to create your unique handle on the Fediverse. For example, my username is @thekitmalone and my full handle is @thekitmalone@hoosier.social. Handles like this look and work a lot like email addresses - they tell us at a glance who you are and what neighborhood on the fediverse you belong to.
E-mail Address: We don’t collect a lot of personal information, but we will need a valid email address to confirm your account.
Password: Make it a good one! Consider using an online tool to generate a random strong password and then confirm it in the next field.
Why do you want to join? We’re interested in knowing a bit about you. First, we want to make sure that our users are either from Indiana or have a genuine connection to Indiana. But also we’d love to hear about where folks are learning about our growing community. Feel free to let us know!
Once you’ve done that, your account will be pending until one of our humans looks it over to make sure you aren’t spam, a potential robot overlord, or both. Until that happens, you can log in and look at some pretty account settings – but you can’t really do much until you’re approved. Luckily you usually only have to wait until one of us has a chance to pause our game or finish our bagel.
Oh no. You can only have one account forever. The only way to get another is to travel to the shadow realm and defeat your evil twin in mortal combat.
Just kidding.
You can have as many accounts on as many different server's (ahem, instances) as you'd like. Go nuts. The official Mastodon app even allows you to switch easily between any number of accounts on different servers!
However, if you want to make Hoosier.Social your new forever home in the Fediverse, there’s a straightforward way for you to import an account from another server and bring all your followers/followees with you. Check out the next section to learn about migration.
THE GREAT MIGRATION
Migration is the process of moving an account from one Mastodon instance to another, while preserving all the precious social connections you made at your previous home.
It’s one of the features of this place that I like best. Not enough corn references in your feed? Just want to be part of a growing new regional Mastodon instance? It’s relatively easy to pack up your furniture and move.
Don’t be afraid! While the process has a lot of steps, they're all pretty easy and non-destructive. I find it easiest to do this in a web browser on my computer, so that's what these instructions assume you are doing.
Hoosier.Social? ✋🏿We're happy to lend a hand. You can DM @thekitmalone or @brian or you can reach out via email at hoosiersocial@hoosier.social.
- In your shiny new
Hoosier.Socialaccount, open up Settings – the gear wheel thingy in the right-hand column when you log in. - Now select Account and then Create an Account Alias. Type in the full handle of your old account, e.g.
schmoo@schmoos.social - Next you’ll need to log in to your old account. I find it easiest to do this by opening a new private window on my browser so that I can also remain logged in to my new account.
- Open up the Settings on your old account and go to Account Settings. From there click Move to a Different Account.
- On this page, you’ll be asked to enter the full handle for your new account (e.g.
schmoo@hoosier.social) and the password. - Once you click Move Followers, your old followers will be migrated to your new account and folks visiting your old account will be redirected to your new home.
- Still in your old account, find Import and Export in the settings. Select Data Export.
- Look for the entries marked Follows, Blocking, Mute, Domain Blocks, and Bookmarks. Click on each category that you want to carry over and download each
.csvfile. You can log out now, you’re done with your old account. - Back in your new account settings, find Import and Export and select Import.
- Use the drop down on this screen to upload each
.csvfile that you downloaded earlier into its proper category.
That’s it! You’ve successfully migrated to a new instance. If you want more detailed directions, check out Mastodon’s official guide.
YOUR PROFILE
Mastodon allows you to fill out a profile with all the usual things - a photo, a bio, some links, etc. Chances are, this isn’t your first rodeo when it comes to social media, so you probably aren’t new to this concept. You may have, like some of us, filled out a few too many of these things.
To edit your profile on the website, just click on your profile name or your empty profile image. Then select Edit Profile to fill in the details.
In the official Mastodon app, tap Profile in the lower right corner of the screen. Then tap Edit Profile.
- Display Name: Different from your username, which doesn’t change, you can change this at any time. Use this for a nickname and, true to the old birdsite tradition, the occasional inside joke.
People around here call Twitter the “birdsite” and I think that’s hilarious. The fact that we still do that after they renamed themselves “X” … is just icing on the schadenfreude cake.
- Bio: On our site, you can have a 500 character bio. I like to keep mine short but descriptive. I also like to toss in a few hashtags to let people know what my whole vibe is.
- Profile Picture and Header: Upload images to serve as your avatar and your header for people to see when they check out your profile.
- Extra fields: Many people use this as a cute little table to list some important things about them - websites they are associated with, workplace, pronouns, etc.
- This is a bot account: You are not a bot. Or at least we hope not. If you click this, many users will filter out posts by you - it’s meant to flag accounts that post automated content.
Mastodon allows you to use your profile metadata to verify your identity! It’s sort of our version of the birdsite's blue check, only it doesn’t cost money and it’s not evil. If you include a website in your extra fields, you can copy a snippet of code provided on the Verification tab of the Edit Profile page (or have a techy friend do it for you) into that website’s code, and you’ll be verified as the legitimate owner of that website and the account!
Want to be verified, but all of that is greek to you? Just reach out to @thekitmalone or @brian and we'll be happy to help you.
PRIVATE PARTS
Since Mastodon isn't commercial, it has no interest in pushing people to share more than they'd like to. In fact, it defaults to keeping your profile a little more private than most people would like.
By default, your public toots can't be searched for by users of other instances. People will still see them when they get shared by an account they follow, but strangers can't find your posts directly in the app or the web interface.
For example: If I'm wild about puppy content, and go to search for "puppies," I'll generally see toots that contain that word. But if your posts aren't searchable and I don't follow you already, none of your precious puppy content will show up in the results.
If you want me to be able to find everything you have to say about puppies, you just need to make a quick change:
- In a browser: While editing your profile, select Privacy and reach. In the Reach section, make sure both items are on.
- On a mobile device: Tap Home in the lower left corner of the app. Tap your account name. Tap Privacy and reach and make sure both options are on.
After you've done this, your puppy-related content will be searchable to all!
FINDING AND FOLLOWING
Mostly, just click the big “follow” button on their profile! For accounts on instances that Hoosier.Social already knows about – that’s all you need to do.
Sometimes you’ll learn about someone you want to follow who isn’t yet known in our little corner of the Fediverse. If you have the link to their profile on their home instance (https://some.instance/@username) or their handle (@someusername@some.instance) you can copy/paste that into the search bar to find and then follow them!
Bonus Points! By following people our instance doesn’t know about yet, they’ll appear more easily to other people. You’re helping to grow our community! Look at you go.
“But my timeline is empty,” you say. “How will I find people to follow?” Never fear, my friend, we have you covered:
- Use Our Starter Pack: It's is an ever-growing collection of accounts on our server and others who are Indiana connected. Head on over there and you can follow them all with just a click or two.
- Check the Directory: You can find accounts that are popular among users in our neighborhood, here: https://hoosier.social/directory
- The Live Feed: You can snoop around on our feed to see who is posting interesting things and follow them from there! (See the next section for info about the various feed thingies you can access.)
- Get Announcements: You should immediately follow @hoosiersocial (important announcements!) and @brian (the lovely gentleman who hosts us and administers the server).
- Make an #Introduction post. by using the hashtag and telling us a little bit about yourself. More about hashtags later, but #Introduction posts are something of a tradition here and are a lovely way to find out more about the people joining our neighborhood!
- Invite your friends! The more people on
Hoosier.Socialmaking and sharing content, the more interesting this place becomes! - Be a “follow back girl.” I find that the more people I follow, the more interesting the content in my timeline becomes. The Fediverse is actually powered by people making authentic connections. That’s neat!
Certain mainstream social media sites have practices and algorithms that privilege "influencers" -- often people who have lots of followers but who themselves follow relatively few people.
SEO consultants and other scum often refer to that as "the ratio."
Mastodon doesn't suffer from this effect. Because the platform doesn't use algorithms to determine what people see, there's no downside to following as many people as you like.
SO MANY TIMELINES, SO LITTLE TIME
Like other social media sites, you have access to a timeline that shows you the things that folks in your network are sharing. Mastodon ups the game by giving you several different timelines, each offering you a different way to interact with the people you follow.
If you're using a web browser you'll find these timelines in menu the right-hand column of the interface.
In the mobile app you can switch between most timelines by tapping Home in the upper left corner of the app.
The Home Timeline
This is your default timeline and probably where you’ll spend the most time! The home timeline simply displays toots and boosts from people or hashtags you follow, no matter what instance they live on.
Other social media services use complicated secret algorithms that in theory attempt to predict what you might find interesting. In practice, many users have found that they mostly use them to feed them more advertising content.
Some data scientists believe that these algorithms also encourage political extremism by creating artificial information "bubbles" over time that show people only increasingly radical content about subjects that they are already likely to agree with.
'Hoosier.Social' and Mastodon don't do this. On our service you simply see the things people post, in the order that they post them. That's it. If the posts in a particular community here lean one way or another, politically, it's likely that this reflects the actual opinions of the individuals who've joined those communities.
The Live Feed
The Live Feed is one of my favorite things! By default, it displays all the toots and boosts from people who use 'Hoosier.Social'. Think of it like our clubhouse - a place where we can see what our whole community is up to.
Sigh. Yeah seriously. A toot is the (yes slightly embarrassing) Mastodon term for a post. A boost is another word for a re-share of someone else’s post.
You can favorite (like) or boost any toot you see. Favoriting a toot simply expresses appreciation for it and has no other function. Boosting a toot can help increase its visibility for everyone - so boost away!
Explore
The Explore section is a firehose of all the people our server knows about and everything they've posted. It can be fun to glance at but most people don't find it to be very useful.
There aren't any! Hoosier.Social, like most communities on the Fediverse, isn't run on a for-profit basis. We're funded by optional donations from our users. This means we make decisions about our community based on what's best for our users, not what's best for the interests of billionaire CEOs or advertisers.
I always like to say that we are like the NPR of social media.
To get to the explore section using the mobile app tap the magnifying glass icon towards the bottom of the screen. In the web browser select explore from the menu in the rightmost column of your interface.
TOOTING OUT TOOTS
This is the easy part! Toots are what it is all about here. Toots, toots, toots…
- Type your thoughts into the text box in the left column in the web browser. In the mobile app, look for the little pencil icon in the bottom right when you're viewing the Home feed.
- Include some hashtags (see HASHING OUT HASHTAGS for more on that). Now would be a great time to start with #Introduction and introduce yourself by telling folks a little about yourself and your interests.
- If you want to tag another user, type out their handle - starting with an
@symbol. For your fellowHoosier.Socialusers or people you follow, you generally only have to type the username part. When you tag another user, they’ll get a notification that you tooted about them. - At the bottom of the text box, you’ll see some tools. You can add images and other attachments, create polls, set the post's visibility, add a content warning, and a ton of other things.
Content warnings are a great feature of Mastodon that allows you to hide something that may be troubling or inappropriate for some behind a warning. When they click on the warning, they’ll be able to see your content.
Mastodon will prompt you to add text descriptions to images that you post so that folks who are visually impaired can get a description. Using that feature consistently is part of Mastodon culture, and I think that’s great.
Toots can be set to any of a variety of visibility levels:
- Public toots can be seen by everyone, and may show up in other users' Explore and Live feeds.
- Quiet Public toots can be seen by everyone, but won't show up in other users' Explore and Live feeds.
- Followers toots can only be seen by people who follow you.
- Specific People toots can only be seen by the people who you @mention in the body of the post.
Warning! Remember that Mastodon is a global network. Public posts on Hoosier.Social are visible to everyone in the Fediverse.
As with any social media service, you should exercise judgment about sharing personal information.
HASHING OUT HASHTAGS
Hashtags Are Super Important Here
They provide an easy way for people all over the Fediverse to see posts about things they are interested in. Use hashtags in your posts to help people find you!
Use Hashtags to Follow Topics
Whether you click on a hashtag or use the search function to look for a hashtag – you can actually “follow” that hashtag just like you’d follow a user! Look for the follow button at the top of the results.
Now you'll see toots from people using that hashtag in your Home feed, even from users who you aren't currently following. It’s a great way to keep tabs on the buzz when it comes to topics that are of special interest to you!
I'd recommend following #HoosierMast and #HoosierSocial right away to follow current events in our community. We also repost a variety of news outlets of regional interest that you can find under #HoosierNews.
Folks use #FediTips to share tips for living life in the Fediverse. (You can also follow @feditips@mstdn.social for more tips!)
Our admins are always happy to help folks who need it - but you can also post a question along with the #MastoHelp hashtag to get advice from the broader community.
I mentioned #Introduction posts before. Follow that one to learn more about folks joining our neighborhood!
Every Friday, folks on the Fediverse do #FollowFriday posts where they lift up interesting accounts that they follow! Following that tag (and doing your own #FollowFriday posts) can be a fun way to build our community!
SLIDING INTO OUR DMS
Yes! You can send direct messages (DMs) to folks on Mastodon, but it works a little differently here. DMs on Mastodon are just like any other post, except with the privacy set to only the users you tag in them.
If you want, for instance, to send me a DM:
- Start a new post.
- Compose your message and
@mentionme by typing:@thekitmalone - Tap the little 🌐 icon (mobile) or click the button in the that says
Public(web) to set the privacy setting to Specific People. - Once you send it, I’ll get the message and I’ll be the only one who sees it (unless you tagged other folks - Mastodon does let you
@mentionmultiple people in a DM).
Warning! Mastodon provides absolutely no end-to-end encryption for any messages you send. Members of the admin team can view any and all content on our instance. The same is true of other social media services whether they admit it or not.
While we promise not to peek, you should be wary of sharing sensitive or personal information on any social media service.
If you require the ability to share sensitive information in a secure way, look into the Signal app. While it is not affiliated with Mastodon, it provides fully encrypted messaging and is widely used by privacy-minded folks.
REPORTING SPAM AND ABUSE
I think the Fediverse is way friendlier than other forms of social media, but our community is still in its infancy. And this is the internet, after all. Unpleasantness happens occasionally. Luckily, Mastodon provides you with tools for dealing with trolls, spammers, and haters.
You can block people for any reason whatsoever from interacting with your personal account. Do this by clicking on the ... icon next to their profile or any of their posts and look for the block option. On mobile, look for the ︙ icon.
There’s also an option to block an entire instance and everyone on it. Be careful with that unless you’re sure you want to do it!
You should report anything you see that you think is inappropriate. That report will be handled by our local moderation team (in most cases, me) swiftly.
- File a report by clicking on the little
...icon at the bottom of the offending post and look for thereportoption. On mobile, look for the︙icon. - Mastodon will ask you if you also want to send another copy of your report to the offending user’s instance administrator. Pretty much always say “yes” to this!
Community moderation is one of the best things about Hoosier.Social. Because we are small, you can be sure that a couple of actual humans who care about the people in this community read every single one of the handful of reports that we receive and respond to them swiftly.
We’re not particularly censorious, but we do take the job of providing a friendly, welcoming community seriously. We use our instance rules as a guide for all moderation, and suspend or block accounts that violate them. That includes people on other instances! They aren't allowed to have their posts be seen on our server if they don't abide by our rules!
There hasn’t been a need for any process beyond that. But it is entirely possible that our community grows. There may be a time when we’ll need to have a more formal content moderation policy.
If that happens, it will certainly be something that happens with the input of our community. That possibility is part of what makes the Fediverse so cool and interesting!
In addition to in-person moderation of individual posts, we also subscribe to a blocklist that automatically blocks entire instances that the Fediverse community has recognized as being poor citizens - by consistently harboring spam, hate speech, disinformation, or other bad behavior. Explaining how this works is beyond the scope of this document - but you can find more information on it here if you are the kind of person who likes to look under the hood!
ADVANCED OPTIONS
Our Mastodon instance offers you a number of tools to improve your experience. These are optional - but not exactly “geek stuff” and you should definitely check them out when you are ready to level up your Mastodon game.
Optional But Cool: The Advanced Web Interface
Are you a power user? Check out the Advanced Web Interface in your preferences. It’s similar to TweetDeck on Twitter (ahem, “the birdsite”). It lets you have multiple columns where you can pin favorite users, lists of users, hashtags, and all kinds of other stuff that lets you see an enormous amount of content in one glance.
Going into detail about how to use it is way beyond the scope of this document, but if you are a power social media user you'll find it to be familiar. To learn more - check out this guide.
Optional But You Should Do It Anyway: Two-Factor Authentication
Two-factor authentication is a system where you use a secondary means of confirming your identity that only you would have access to in order to confirm your identity.
It’s an extra layer of security that makes it much more difficult for your account to be hacked. It’s available on most mainstream social media services, and that’s true here as well. I highly recommend enabling it everywhere that it’s available.
- You can do that on
Hoosier.Socialby first logging into the site with a web browser.
- Open your Settings and looking for Account and then Two-Factor Auth in the left-hand menu.
- Next, click the blue button that says Enable 2FA and follow the instructions to set it up with an app on your secondary device (typically your phone).
- If you don’t have an authenticator app that you already use, Google Authenticator works well and you can download it onto your phone for free.
SO MUCH MORE
This guide is just intended to get you up and participating in our community. There is, of course, so much more to know about how Mastodon works and how to get the most out of it. I highly recommend visiting https://fedi.tips for a comprehensive guide!
WHO THE HECK WROTE THIS
I’m Kit! I’m a heavy social media user who is tired of using platforms that are at the mercy of wealthy people. I’m an activist and community organizer by both profession and nature - so I believe passionately in building and supporting local communities.
When I was shopping for a permanent home on the Fediverse, Hoosier.Social just seemed a perfect fit for someone like me.
@brian has dubbed me Chief Ambassador for Hoosier.Social and I’ll take it. I believe strongly that the best and most pro-social future for social media is one where the public square isn’t under the central control of any one institution, organization, politician, billionaire, or company and I’m happy to work to make something like that a fun, useful option for Hoosiers like me.
- You can find me at @thekitmalone. If you’re already a user, chances are I follow you or soon will! I toot about all kinds of things, but particularly about #LGBTQ stuff along with national and local #Politics.
- I’m also on the administration team for
Hoosier.Social– if you see something you don’t like that violates one of the instance rules, be sure to report it! - I’m quite happy to help you help you navigate nerd stuff when you are having trouble figuring something out here. Honest! Just send me a DM.
Valuable feedback and input for this project was given by @benmcramer, @brian, @scottstarkey.
COPYRIGHT AND RE-USE
This guide, the Corn-De-Lis logo and all other content herein is provided under the terms of the Creative Commons CC-BY-NC 4.0 license. That means you are welcome to freely share and adapt this work for non-commercial purposes, so long as you provide an attribution to Hoosier.Social as the creator of the original resource.