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Tips & tricks

Don't delete your Twitter account!

If you deactivate/delete your Twitter account, your @ handle will be publicly available in 30 days. The chances that you will be impersonated with no recourse is very high! Don’t do it - especially if you had a fairly popular account.

To safely clean/wipe your account do this instead:

  1. Deactivate your Twitter account
  2. Go to twitter.com/login and reactivate it. All of your followers will be gone.
  3. Now lock the account and let it rot.

You can use a tool like semiphemeral.com for wiping data, including DMs.

Hashtags are king and queen

With no AI or algorithm to push "relevant" content, a huge part of the discovery and exploration of Mastodon is based on hashtags. Use them liberally.

You can also subscribe to hashtags like you would a user:

  • Search for the hashtag
  • Click on the hashtag in the search result
  • In the upper right corner of the list of posts (tweets) there is a small icon looking like a person with a + sign on the right-hand side. It's confusingly identical to the "follow user" icon. Click that, and you should get all posts with that hashtag in your regular timeline.

Did you see a person's profile has some special tags with numbers? Those are "Featured Hashtags." They are useful to present yourself more; for example, I often post about software, so I have #Software as a featured hashtag, so everyone can click it and find all my posts about software.

To create them:

  • Go to Preferences > Profile > Featured Hashtags
  • You will be offered hashtags you often use
  • Type one hashtag, like #sport, and Add
  • Repeat the steps above to add more hashtags

Advanced UI mode

If you are familiar with Tweetdeck or other 3rd-party Twitter apps, they often support multiple timelines/lane side by side rather than a single list of tweets like Twitter.

This is natively available on the Mastodon web app, and you can change it this way:

  • Go to Preferences
  • Check Enable advanced web interface
  • Click Save Changes
  • Go back to your timeline.
  • Search a tag you love, for example, #Food, #Sport, or #Nature
  • Click a tag found, then a column of that tag appears
  • Click the "triple lines" button to the top-right, click PIN
  • Click UNPIN if you want to remove a column

Lists

Lists help you watch over certain people separately.

For example, you may create three lists of My Family, Colleagues, Bots, which contain your family, and your colleagues, and the bots you follow.

You can create and maintain your lists here in the menu under Lists

The search box supports searching for URLs/links to profiles and posts from other servers. This allows you to open a post or profile from a different server to follow, like, comment, and share the post or profile without opening a new window. This is a nice shortcut.

Example links you can search for:

Using your own domaain as alias

Mastodon makes it ~fairly easy for you to add aliases to your account so you can be found under names (e.g., your private domain like jippi.dev).

For example, my personal domain is jippi.dev, and I've set up so @jippi@jippi.dev and @me@jippi.dev will find my account @jippi@expressional.social across all servers. You can think of it as an e-mail redirect/forward.

It can be incredibly useful since it will allow people to find you via your regular e-mail. Since it's a redirect/forward, if you move to another server in the future, your alias can be updated to point to the new server transparently without updating many links across the web.

Head over to our interactive guide for using your own domain for Mastodon to learn more.