Much Ado About Mastodon

While chatting with a friend who was wondering how I keep up with interesting developments in Emacs, I mentioned Mastodon as a great resource. I’ve really been enjoying Mastodon, and I think it is a great way to keep up with technologies and hobbies you may be passionate about. I also feel like Mastodon is easy to engage a like-minded community, but perhaps you’ve been hesitant? While you can find small, vibrant communities buzzing around a particular piece of tech, like Emacs, on aaaaallll the social medias, I thought I would detail a path for an Emacsian, such as yourself, to engage the Emacs community with Mastodon. Hopefully, this short, simple three-step process … won’t be out-of-date as soon as I publish this (last update May 2024).

The First Step… create an account.

But which server should I join?

Doesn’t matter. Here. I’ll help you. Click Create account on https://emacs.ch/about … better yet, click this: https://emacs.ch/invite/tfYqTMFD

Done.

Second Step… update your profile and post an Introduction to you new-found community. This usually has the hashtag, #introduction as well as any other hashtags of personal interests. As you’ve heard, Mastodon is a federation of communities, not a SBC (Single Behemoth Corporation) with an all-seeing and all-directing algorithm to focus your attention. Instead, we hashtag the hell out of our posts to cast the “Toot” to those who might want to read it.

Third Step… start reading stuff. You have four sub-steps …

1. Try out the “local” timeline, which shows you messages from anyone else who has joined the same server (in this case emacs.ch) … People on a particular server don’t always talk about that subject, but they did join a subject-oriented server, so …
2. People talking about about a subject use a hashtag, so check out the #emacs hashtag (or #orgmode or #elfeed, etc): https://emacs.ch/tags/emacs
3. Perhaps follow topic-specific news feeds. For Emacs News, try Following these:
   • @RSSBot@emacs.ch
   • @emacslife@emacs.ch
   • @sachac@emacs.ch … Sacha Chua supplies the Emacs news, so maybe that is more than sufficient
4. You might also want to hear from topic-specific personalities. For some famous Emacsians that toot somewhat reliably, perhaps Follow these fine folks¹:
   • @zamansky@csed.social … who blogs about Emacs and teaching CS
   • @daviwil@fosstodon.org … who does the System Crafters
   • @bbatsov@hachyderm.io … who does a lot of open source projects, especially Cider and Clojure in Emacs
   • @tarsius@emacs.ch … the author of Magit
   • @mathpunk@mastodon.social … who has some fun Emacs projects
   • @louis@emacs.ch … who started the emacs.ch server
   • @rougier@toot.aquilenet.fr … who makes Emacs very pretty
   • @robpike@hachyderm.io … Rob Pike is pretty active … just not about Emacs. 😏

You’ll notice that the links above are from the Emacs server, but the users are on different servers spread out from the Fediverse. That’s the idea. The only reason to join any particular server, like emacs.ch server is to easily reach out to people on that “Local” timeline. In other words, which server you join doesn’t mean much.

An optional Fourth Step, is to install the Mastodon client on your mobile device, and the mastodon.el client for Emacs (see my Emacs configuration for details).

I guess at this point, you might want to read the Mastodon Docs.

For those of you who have been using Mastodon for a while, what else would you recommend I add?