#penisland — Public Fediverse posts on home.social

@Fractalzend Howdy! And welcome to Mastodon!

A few tips to get you started, since you said that Mastodon was all new to you:

One of the things I really like about this place is there's no algorithm shoving engagement bait from people you don't know in your face; you only see things from people you follow. The flip side, of course, is that when you're new and not following many people yet, it can seem pretty quiet and boring. So! When you have time, find people to follow and build your feed.

How to do that, though? See what the people you are following post, link to, and boost, and follow more people that look interesting; that part's pretty self-explanatory.

The "live feeds" section has three tabs that will show you posts from people you don't know: People on the same server you're on ("this server"), posts from people across the fediverse that people on your server follow ("other servers"), and...I'm not sure of the last one ("all"), but I think it's a combination of the two. It's pretty random, and I don't use these much, but they're options.

Off the top of my head, a few recommendations that you might find interesting:

- @FediTips - tips on how to get the most out of Mastodon
- @tychotithonus - my old friend Royce; pretty sure you met him a few times
- @norwescon and @SeattleWorldcon2025 - the two cons I'm involved in here (okay, maybe not _super_ interesting for you, but I'm going to plug them anyway)
- @dilmandila - a filmmaker and author; I met him when he was nominated for the #PhilipKDickAward, you may be more interested in his filmmaking posts
- @todayonscreen - posts daily important events as seen in films
- @Jyoti - the musican behind White Town ("Your Woman")
- @macrumors - Apple and macOS news

Hashtags are used a _lot_ here. Use the search field to look for terms around areas you might be interested in (#film? #audio?), or follow hashtags that look interesting in other people's posts. If your hashtag contains multiple words, it works best if you use #CamelCase so that screen readers know where the word breaks are and read them correctly (for one classic example, is #penisland "Pen Island" or "Penis Land"?).

You may want to post an introduction post saying hello and letting people know who you are and what you're interested in. Here's mine as one example; you can find more by skimming the #introduction tag: https://tenforward.social/@djwudi/109377489172323601

If/when you post photos, adding #AltText to describe the image for screen reader users is highly recommended and a large part of the general fediverse culture. If you'd like help, you can use the #Alt4Me tag to ask for alt text suggestions.

Another part of the culture here is using "Content Warnings" (or sometimes called "Content Wrappers") to give a brief subject line for a post that readers have to click through before reading the entire post. People might use them in addition to hashtags to flag subjects that others might not want to see (like political, NSFW, possibly controversial content, movie/TV spoilers, etc.). I've used one for this post because it's so damn long. :)

Since Mastodon (and the wider fediverse) is federated across multiple servers, the server you choose can have an effect on what you see -- and whether you're seen. While mastodon.social (your current server) is one of the largest servers out there, it has a questionable-at-best reputation, has had issues with problematic users and moderation, and is even blocked (defederated) by many other servers. As you get more used to Mastodon, you may want to keep an eye out for other servers you could move to. I'm on tenforward.social, which (if you hadn't guessed) tends to attract #StarTrek fans, and is very well moderated; it also has some other benefits, like a 10,000 character post limit instead of the default 500 (which is why I'm able to put all of this in a single post).

There's probably more I'm not thinking of at the moment, but hopefully this will be enough to get you started and sticking around. Enjoy, and toss me questions if you ever want or need!