Getting started

Your own instance?

Don't have your own Mastodon instance yet? You'll find the right hosting with us.

The Fediverse

The Fediverse consists of more than Mastodon. For readability, we focus on Mastodon in this article, although many of the statements also apply to other services using the ActivityPub protocol, such as Pixelfed or PeerTube.

Social media without algorithms

Mastodon works fundamentally differently from traditional social media platforms such as X (formerly Twitter), Facebook or Instagram. The most important difference is that there are no algorithms that automatically feed content into users' timelines. This is a deliberate design principle to give users full control over their timeline and to rule out algorithmic curation of content.

However, this presents a challenge: new Mastodon instances and users have to actively work on being discovered. Content does not automatically appear in other people's timelines - it has to be made visible through interaction and networking.

Different timelines

There are different types of timelines in Mastodon:

Home timeline

The home timeline shows all posts from accounts you follow in chronological order, as well as posts with hashtags you follow and boosts from accounts you follow. This is the default timeline that users see after logging in.

Local timeline

The local timeline shows all public posts from all users on your own Mastodon instance. Especially on well-moderated instances, it can be a source of interesting posts.

Federated timeline

The federated timeline shows all public posts known to your own instance. This includes posts from accounts that local users follow, as well as content from connected relays.

Getting discovered

As mentioned at the beginning, Mastodon does not use algorithms to control which posts are shown in the timeline. However, there are various ways to get "discovered", which we introduce below.

Distinctive profile

Fill in the important fields of your user profile. If possible, use website verification to prove your authenticity. You can also fill in the "Featured hashtags" and write a little about yourself in your bio. Other profiles you know can serve as a guide.

Appropriate hashtags

Hashtags are the most important tool for being discovered on Mastodon, as they are the primary way users come across new and interesting content. You can take advantage of this:

• Research well-known hashtags that match the content of your posts.
• Use both popular and more specific niche hashtags.
• Write hashtags in CamelCase, i.e., with each word capitalized, for better readability and accessibility.

Create an introduction post

A post with the hashtag #Introduction is an established tradition on Mastodon and an effective way to be discovered. Describe who you are, what you are interested in and which topics you want to post about. Here, too, use relevant hashtags for the topics you are interested in. You can pin this post to your profile so that new profile visitors see it right away.

Active networking and engagement

Interaction is the key to an active, growing network on Mastodon. Comment on other users' posts and boost interesting ones. Also remember to respond to comments on your posts to build active communication. If you follow hashtags that interest you, you can easily find exciting posts where you can get involved.

Mastodon relays

Mastodon relays are special servers that forward and share content between different Mastodon instances. They work like distributors: a relay subscribes to the public timelines of various instances and distributes their activities to participating Mastodon servers via the ActivityPub protocol. This creates a separate network within the federation in which content is shared.

When an instance joins a relay, all public posts from participating servers are routed to the instance's federated timeline. This leads to more activity on the federated timeline, better search results for hashtags and greater reach for posts by users of participating Mastodon instances.

Once you have found a suitable relay, you can add it as the instance operator in your Mastodon settings under "Administration > Relays".

Advantages and disadvantages of relays

Mastodon relays usually give new instances a good start: you don't have to start from scratch to get your posts out to a wide network and may even be discovered right away. Users of your own instance are also usually happy that more content from other users is visible. In addition, hashtag-based searches return significantly more results.

However, using Mastodon relays also greatly increases the storage requirements of the Mastodon instance, as media files, for example, are also copied to every participating server - this can quickly add up to 10-20 GB of data per day. By default, we configure a fairly short retention period for "remote media", i.e., media files from other servers, on your Mastodon hosting. If they are accessed again later, they are fetched again from the respective server. This saves storage space on your instance.

We recommend joining only one or two relays, as more traffic also means significantly more load for the Mastodon background processes. This can cause your Mastodon instance to respond more slowly than usual. Check beforehand which relays match your topics and join only those.

Also keep in mind that third-party content has to be moderated as well, for example to reduce the risk of spam for your users.

Finding suitable relays

One possible source for Mastodon relays is relaylist.com. There you can find active or available relay servers and also see their registration status and the number of connected instances.

There are also sites where relays are sorted by topic, as well as customizable relays such as relay.fedi.buzz.