As many users seek alternatives to X, rival social network Mastodon says that its official app downloads are up 47% on iOS.
Mastodon founder Eugen Rochko says downloads on Android are also up 17%, while total monthly sign-ups rose approximately 27% to 90,000.
The open-source X rival functions much like its competitor, the site formerly known as Twitter, on the outside. However, unlike the centralized Twitter, Mastodon consists of thousands of different social networks, which are integrated into a web it calls the “fediverse.”
I’d love to join them, but most of my friends just didn’t like mastodon. Mostly because the discoverability was horrible. You need to know what instance your friend is on.
I still use it personally, but mostly for OSS dev side of things
of course you need. your friends need to tell you. only they can know. just like with email and IRL cities
I mean, it’s just like e-mail addresses, I really don’t understand the difficulty. Yes technically if I want to e-mail joe smith, I need to know his address, including what mail provider he uses. Which is why when I ask for his e-mail address he tells me “Joesmith@gmail.com”. and not just joesmith.
Yeah, I really don’t understand why people are so confused. From a practical perspective your username is username@instance.tld and that’s it. You’re on some server and can simply follow that guy@mastodon.social and you will see the posts.
The weird thing is that it doesn’t matter what instance/server your friends are on. If they follow you, they’ll get all your posts in their feed. The best advice I can give anyone starting out on Mastodon is to follow tags instead of people in order to surface interesting posts, then you can follow people as they come up on feeds.