Thread by @DanielGenealogy

Hey #Genealogy Twitter, don't scroll past this yet!
So as time progresses, I've seen people wondering if Twitter does go down in a ball of fire or people leave, where to go?

One of these suggestions was Mastodon.

While it's been described as not an alternative to Twitter, it's very similar to how it operates. You can respond, boost (retweet) and favourite (like) tweets and even see all the hustle and bustle of Twitter.

There are also some improvements to Mastodon that aren't on Twitter.

One of these things is the character count in a post. You can have 500 characters in a post on M compared to 280 characters on T. Another thing is there are no ads or algorithm-suggested/popular tweets, who you follow is all that will appear in your timeline unless...

...someone boosts (RTs) a post that they see, but if that happens, you'll see the profile picture of the person who boosted it next to the person who posted, to begin with, see the example below.

You are able to see the content of hashtags, so you could do Twitter chats here too.

If what I mentioned takes your fancy, here's how you join. If you're joining through the app, it'll ask you what server you join. This isn't too important as it doesn't matter what one you pick. But make a note of what one it is because you'll need that later.

So here's how my profile looks. The yellow underline is the username that I chose - @thedanielsgenealogy, the green underline is the server I'm a part of. If you googled 'Mastodon login' it would take you to a Mastodon page but this will not allow you to login to your account...

...unless that one is the server you joined under. So for me, if I wanted to log in to my account on Mastodon, I'd have to login to the bit in the green underline - toot.community - this is the one I'm a part of and many other genies are a part of as well.

But I'm just repeating here before I keep going, I'm not planning on leaving - I'll be using both Mastodon and Twitter so don't worry!

Whether you decide to leave Twitter is your own choice, I'm just saying that I'll still be here.

P.S. - I was going to compile a list of resources, but @ResearchBuzz has curated this, which should help people to further understand it.

https://twitter.com/ResearchBuzz/status/1588658629309333505?s=20&t=l6EGZTZufYB1AIYA18XE-Q

And that's this thread! If you're on Mastodon, share your username (include all of it) and RT the thread, let's get connected there. My username is @[e-mail] - see you there!

@threadreaderapp please unroll