Before you do anything, please familiarize yourself with the Code of Conduct. It’s not long, it’s very important, and it establishes the cultural boundaries that we expect of everybody who participates in the community.

It might also be helpful to get some initial terminology out of the way:

Mastodon is a Twitter-like social media platform that uses federation to communicate between accounts across a variety of servers. It’s similar to email: if you have an account bob@gmail.com, you can send an email to alice@hotmail.com even though you use GMail and Alice uses Hotmail. Mastodon works the same way- though we call the network of interconnected instances the Fediverse.

If you want to know more, this guide is pretty thorough. You can also reach out to Steve with any questions and he’ll be happy to answer.

Let’s dive into the fun stuff!

Bootstrapping a timeline

Mastodon is a bit different than other social networks in that it requires a bit of up-front work to get value out of. When you first join it’s not going to give you algorithmic recommendations of posts to see and accounts to follow. This can be a bit discouraging at first, but this guide is here to help you overcome the static friction.

Thankfully you’re on an instance where you should know at least one person: whoever invited you. Start out by giving them a follow and perusing through their timeline to see others that they’ve boosted/mentioned who might also be worth following.

Once you’ve done that, we’ve also curated a list of accounts that might be interesting to follow here. Give that list a gander, see if you find anything you like, and if so give ‘em a follow to get some stuff into your timeline.

Your home timeline will always show you a chronological listing of posts from people you follow. If you run out of stuff to read on your timeline, you can also browse the instance timeline, which displays posts from anybody on Illegible.club. This is a great way to keep a pulse on the community as a whole and a fun way to curate posts given that you’re ideally one-to-two degrees of separation from anybody you see posting there.

Once you’re feeling comfortable, we’d highly recommend posting a short introduction post using the #introduction hashtag. You can check out Steve’s intro as an example. Ideally some members of the instance will say howdy and welcome you aboard- it’s another great way of finding some people for your timeline.

Apps

If you’re so inclined to use Mastodon on your phone, there are a ton of options for clients. The baseline is just opening illegible.club on your phone and using the mobile web interface- that’s totally fine if you don’t mind it.

If you want a slick UI and some more bells and whistles, here are a few other options:

• The official Mastodon client for Android/iOS
• Toot! for iPad/iPhone
• phanpy.social - A third party web client for desktop and mobile.

More coming soon…

This guide was hastily thrown together as I set up the instance and still needs some fleshing out. If you want to help out, please reach out!