No problem, happy to help ?

First, one needs to get the word "Mastodon" it of their head and vocabulary, except when specifically referring to the server platform itself.

In other words, this isn't mastodon, and in the grand picture, you're not in mastodon - you're in the #Fediverse, and mastodon is but a small part of the Fediverse, which is powered by dozens of types of Fediverse servers running the #ActivityPub protocol to engage with millions of people just like yourself.

In a very small and limited view, sure, if your account is on a mastodon server you might say you're a mastodonian, or whatever these n00bs coming from #Twatter are trying to brand themselves as.

But that's a very simple minded perspective, because they're actually #Fedizens - members of the Fediverse. And mastodon is very limited anyway in what it can do for account holders on that platform. You can't make posts larger than a paltry 500 characters. You can't make "local only" posts. There's no chat. You can't post in markdown, BBCode, it's HTML (even Myspace could do that). There's no groups, and it is purposely missing several other key components by design, like articles, to say the least (you can only do notes) that other ActivityPub powered Fediverse platforms empower you with.

The are a couple of mastodon forks that were born out of extreme frustration that have implemented some of those things (I note that you use a fork of Blender, so you're familiar with forks). Some of those forks are well maintained, some are crappy hacks, and some are abandoned altogether. You can look around if you like.

So perhaps one of them most important distinctions is that you created an account on a mastodon instance, but you "Joined" the Fediverse. Just by virtue of you being able to see all of this traffic across the Fediverse demonstrates how limited in scope your ability to to interact on that level actually is. Mastodon is fine for #shitposting or posting one or two small paragraphs of plain text with a link or picture, but IMNSHO that's about it. You can't do a Fediverse search on hashtags (only local in your stream), and it's rather slow resolving searches for Fediverse users compared to dinner other platforms, although those last couple of items are rather trivial for most people.

One more thing: Mastodon doesn't call them toots anymore. There current version (v4 0.1) correctly refers to them as "posts", and the toot button had been replaced with a "Publish" button...

Because that's what you're doing - Posting a 'note' to the Fediverse (remember, mastodon only publishes notes, and not articles or anything else. You've probably also noticed by now that the search utility for users is also hidden in the latest release - you have to click on the hashtag symbol and then there's still not indication that you can search for users that you may want to follow or read the posts of...

But you can, just start by entering the "@" sign. The user search will appear eventually after you enter the address for a user ?

Just focusing on that annoying 500 character limit, your can either join, self-host, or pay a fully managed hosting provider to deploy your own Fediverse server. The first three links in that post of mine that you referred to offer you the ability to do just that (5000 character limits out of the box and adjustable if you want more), and in that order.

Aside from those first three links in my previous post, you can also get a hugely more robust and polished interface with many capabilities rivaling that if some the most popular and traditional social networking platforms that people are used to in that old deprecated, privacy disrespecting, legacy monolithic silo space (i.e., #Faceplant).

The Friendica link is s good one to pick for that robust environment.

#Mitra offers you publishing focussed blogging of news and article authoring that effectively replaces #Medium and #Subststsack - people anywhere in the Fediverse (even mastodon) can subscribe and your work is monitized!

#Quanta is extremely powerful as a business class Fediverse server. Here's a video series that showcases Quanta's immense capabilities - even publishing web pages and collaborative document management:

https://invidious.snopyta.org/playlist?list=PLQD3WR1NH3Ko-iQUx7gdb5aI83maeM4Va&local=true

On all of the platforms I've just mentioned, aside from advanced features, you can still just send and receive #shitposts or short messages just like with mastodon. You lose nothing, but gain so many more features.

Well, I invite you to checkout many if them other types of Fediverse server platforms and try a few out - it costs you nothing to join an instance and learn about it.

I hope that helps!

#tallship

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