Overview

We currently have two social media instances that are different. This document explains them and some general tips. Anybody can sign up for multiple accounts on either.

Mastodon/Raverdon

We have a Mastodon SW instance at https://friends.ravergram.club that is named Raverdon in the portal.

The instances I run and most of the fediverse is free of advertising, AI(Artificial Intelligence algorithms that manipulate your feeds), corporate, and government control. It is federated meaning that even though only a few people may be on this server, you can follow and communicate with millions of people on thousands of other servers. Still don't quite understand what and why?

Here is a short video.

Guides

This is a big one. https://hueyy.github.io/awesome-mastodon/

Discovering Who to Follow

When you look at the federated timeline, you see what other people on our instance are following and some instances we are relaying with. The fediverse is very popular with data literate people who understand internet technology. So it may look like a nerd fest. You can change that by sharing what you like and following more diverse people. You can start here with finding people to follow.

If you are part of the #TwitterMigration, https://movetodon.org will help you establish your Twitter connections.

See everybody your follows follow https://followgraph.vercel.app/

Lemmy (alternative to Reddit)

Mastodon, Firefish, and other fediverse implementations work like Facebook or Twitter where people follow other people/accounts or hashtags. Lemmy works like Reddit where people join communities to discuss and upvote or downvote topics in those communities. 

Reddit has been facing a mass exodus as it prepares to IPO as a profitable company and has clamped down on many of the anonymous and ad free ways to access it. They have also started censoring more.

I have setup an instance at https://lemmy.peoplever.se. I am still tweaking a few things and might have it locked for new signups while doing so. I can open it up for you to create accounts if you ask. 

You will be able to subscribe to and engage in any of the many communities out there. You can also create and manage your own community if you want to start one.

My general tips for using Social Media

Getting Started

The fediverse is growing slowly. Do not expect many of your friends or family to join anytime soon. Many are trapped or heavily invested in corporate and government controlled social media and will never leave. You will find some smart, funny, interesting, and brave people in the fediverse over time. It takes a while to get into it as no algorithms are telling you who to follow.

Some people are hesitant to invest effort building up new social networks. Mastodon and other apps on our server are brilliantly designed for portability. Even though you are creating and using accounts on this instance, you are not bound to it. If this instance or the moderator starts to suck, you can rather easily move to another instance of your own or another community any time you want. You bring all your follows, followers, and other settings when you move with a few steps.

Compartmentalizing Your Facets

I encourage people to compartmentalize their identities and related activities on the internet since you would not want to reveal the same aspects of yourself to your boss, your friends, your family, activists, corporations, and your lovers. Most people already do this on government controlled social media by having a Linkedin account for professional stuff, Facebook for personal, and Twitter for political. Each account can be seen as a facet of yourself that might be narrow but deep. Segmenting your facets makes a better experience for your followers since many people are only interested in one facet of you.

I have an account with my first and last name and my pictures that is somewhat personal and tame. I approve who can follow this account. I also have a professional focused account. I share and discuss more political topics with other anonymous accounts. I want people to be able to find me by name, but I don't want spooks and corporations to know everything about me. I tell my friends about my political accounts and leave it to them if they want to follow and engage with me on such topics.

When you post, you can set how public or private you want the post to be. Although this is one of the most private social media services you can use, web crawlers can scrape anything you post publicly. If your account is anonymous, you don't need to worry that what you post publicly will be held against you in the future. If I am going to share pictures of a party I had, I generally post from my personal account to followers only. You can figure out your own strategy.