Hey Alan,
While I know that you can communicate with anyone regardless of your mastodon account address, I am wondering if it is possible to view the local timeline of an instance for which you are not a part. In other words, if I am in mastodon.social (as I signed up many years ago), is it possible for me to view the timeline of mastodon.OERu? If not, how do I what those folks are posting in order to have conversations? Do I have to search for individuals one by one? Or do I need multiple mastodon accounts for each instance that I am interested in? Thank you!!
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Karen, my experience is that if you just follow anyone you encounter who says anything interesting, regardless of instance, your timeline will soon have everyone on it who’s good to have. I recently switched to the social.fossdle.org instance, and my timeline is already full of great posts just from following all the same people as before.
Hi Karen, I am fairly sure local instance timelines are not publicly viewable, although on most the posts/toots individually are viewable as a URL. Like twitter, the timestamp can be right/control clicked to copy a link, so this post from @Mackiwg is viewable anywhere
https://mastodon.oeru.org/@mackiwg/109332255983416027
Unlike twitter, there is no means (at least I know) to search across the fediverse. To see content cross instances, you can try the federated timeline (I almost never do, but it will be a broad view) or follow specific hash tags (I have seen some that lapse content by some period).
It bears some understanding as we all workout this kinks what are the ways to navigate here, and keep reminding one self that it is both familiar and different.
I agree with @stevefoerster the best strategy is following not a giant number of known contacts and just getting used to the volume and range of information. Chances are you will follow a few that repost and communicate with people you do not know, and then choose to follow.
Personally, I am being conservative now and not madly following tons of people. I am not just reciprocating back follows as a response either. I had a different approach in twitter, I learned I couldfollow a large number of people, but rarely looked at the web or algorithmic view, Instead, I created a list of ~150 key contacts I would read more regularly via a column in Tweetdeck, or the one list view on my phone.
The list view is what we see in Mastodon, but looking mainly at our followers, then a bit broader to an instance (if there is a volume of interested in content, where I sit now on Mastodon.social, there’s much I am not that interested in).
On the web version, you might have to change your preferences to enable “Advanced Web View” which provides more of a Tweetdeck like interface.
Like you, I am finding my way still. I do not think there are lot of absolutely “right” and “wrong” ways here, and I am eager for maybe not just trying to replicate twitterness in the fediverse. It’s wild and wooly!
For most instances, you can view on the web with the Explore link/URL for the instance. So using the OERU instance as an example, you will see all public posts. So it will not include unlisted posts that you may have seen by following the authors of those unlisted posts.