Mastodon Makes It Easier for Beginners to Get Started

pcmag.com:

Twitter refugees should have an easier time getting started at Mastodon and will find fewer missing Twitter features on the distributed microblogging service, thanks to changes announced(Opens in a new window) Monday by the German nonprofit that develops Mastodon’s open-source code. 

“We understand that deciding which Mastodon service provider to kick off your experience with can be confusing,” founder and CEO Eugen Rochko says. “This is a completely new concept for many people, since traditionally the platform and the service provider are one and the same.”

So instead of presenting a long list of servers(Opens in a new window) and telling newcomers to pick one out of thousands(Opens in a new window) in Mastodon’s federated archipelago before creating an account, the joinmastodon.org site will steer new users to the mastodon.social server(Opens in a new window) run by the same company.

Rochko’s Monday post describes this new default as “now” available, but as of Tuesday afternoon, the site still showed the usual list of servers.

In that post, he also says Mastodon will oblige requests for equivalents to Twitter’s quote-tweet and search features. Those tools remain officially unsupported (back in 2018, Rochko posted(Opens in a new window) that a quoting feature “inevitably adds toxicity to people's behaviors”), although some third-party Mastodon apps support quote-posting. 

“We’re always listening to the community and we’re excited to bring you some of the most requested features, such as quote posts, improved content and profile search, and groups,” he writes. “We’re also continuously working on improving content and profile discovery, onboarding, and of course our extensive set of moderation tools, as well as removing