With Elon Musk’s recent tirade of banning almost every person on the platform has left a lot of people turning to mastodon. Mastodon is not the same as Twitter though. Created as a safe-haven for those who were pushed out of Twitter, Mastodon has a lot more accessibility options and requires knowing more etiquette.

Starting with features, Mastodon has a lot of features that help those who might be disabled in some way or otherwise. For example, for each image you upload, you can add descriptive text to explain what the image is showing for those who are visually-impaired. It is considered very important to do so as those people will not understand your posts if you do not do so.

Another feature that Mastodon boasts is the content warning. Content warnings allow you to tag posts with certain warnings for those who might be disturbed by them. Generally most every post should have one, because even if you are not posting anything that is disturbing to you, it may be to others. Some examples of possible content warnings include: Eyecontact, anything that may be considered NSFW, or general descriptions of your post. A good use of content warning that does not include a warning may be a news headline. 

One of my personal favorite features of Mastodon is the ‘delete and repost’ button. The delete and repost button allows you to ‘edit’ your posts. The only downside is that you lose any favorites (likes) and boosts (retweets) that were originally on your post. The lack of algorithms means that these don’t really matter though.

The algorithm is time based, so that newer posts are shown more. An example of this is if you create an introduction post (which you should), it will be at the bottom of the timeline unless you edit it or reboost it. Generally, you should try to reboost your introduction post once a week, so people who might be interested in you can find you.

Hashtags are an important part of Mastodon. Unlike Twitter, because mastodon does not have an algorithm that boosts specific posts, people need to find your amazing posts about spiders. To do this you need to add hashtags. First write your post as normal, then add all related hashtags at the bottom.

For example in this post I made to mastodon about misinformation (which I misspelled) I added hashtags to each post that I made, even though they were in 3 parts. This allows anyone to use the search bar to find my post if they search any of these hashtags.

Decentralization is one of the flagship features of Mastodon. The concept of Mastodon and many other decentralized social media is that everyone has the ability to host their own web servers, which others can join or they can keep theirs private, only allowing themselves to join. Afterwards people then set their own rules and only connect to other servers and people they are interested in. It is important to choose the right instance and there are many tools to do as such. For example, https://mastodon.help/instances/en lets you search based off keyword and language, so if you like knitting you could type into there.

Etiquette

Etiquette is an important part of Mastodon. Here are some important rules to follow:

• Content Warning(CW) all of your posts, even ones you can’t imagine someone suffering from, you never know how people will take your post. You should not make the decision for everyone else that the post is ok.
• Introductions are an important part of people finding you and knowing what your all about. As such make sure to create an introduction and pin it to your profile. You can also boost your post every week or so to get farther up in results so people find you. Generally, introduction posts have the #introduction tag at the bottom, and other things you might be interested in, such as hobbies or what sector of work you are in.
• Image descriptions are necessary. Make sure that you describe every image well so that those who are visually-impaired can understand and enjoy your content. 
• Hashtags are the way people find posts, so make sure to add hashtags to most every post. When you do, make sure to add them to the bottom, as those who are using audio to read out the posts will hear ‘hashtag [ ]’ in the middle of your sentences, and that might be annoying.

These are some general differences and Etiquette to keep in mind when switching. This post is not a comprehensive guide and may become out of date. Make sure to do your own research when looking into things similar to this in order to get a better picture.