Since this wiki is aimed at people who are new to mountains.social, we assume you have already created an account on the instance. This is not intended as full documentation for Mastodon, but as a supplement to the official Mastodon docs, with some information specific to mountains.social.
Before you start following people, it is recommended to start by setting up your profile. In this way people know a bit about the person who starts following them.
If you have a website, you can use it to verify your identity on Mastodon. If you don't, you could set up a free about.me account and linking back to your Mastodon profile from it. Such a verification is however completely optional.
You can choose to feature certain hashtags that you use often. Go to Settings → Profile → Featured hashtags to manage which hashtags you are currently featuring. Once featured, a link to the hashtag will be shown on your profile, with the date of the last time it was used in a status, as well as the total number of statuses in which it was used.
Now that you've got your profile set up, it's time to start connecting with people and finding the content you're interested in.
Best advice I can give: follow lots of people! As there is no algorithm, your timeline only has content from people that you follow. If there is not so much content: follow more people. Check the local timeline of the instance who is posting, check who they are following, etc. Search with hashtags (e.g. #hiking) to find people with the same interests. You can always unfollow later, when your timeline becomes cluttered or your interests shift.
If you're coming from Twitter and haven't deactivated your account there yet, it's a good idea to start with a tool like Movetodon to find your Twitter contacts on Mastodon. Trunk is also a good resource for finding people in certain categories of interest. Followgraph gives you a deep dive into your extended network, by looking up your follows' follows. Follow FediFollows, which is an account that posts interesting accounts to follow.
Searching for content on Mastodon is a bit different than searching on Twitter. Mastodon has limited full-text search (keyword search), but instead heavily relies on hashtags. Mastodon’s basic search allows logged-in users to find posts containing a specific hashtag, or to load a user or status directly if they know the URL or address. Searching for a term will show profiles whose username or display name contains that term, as well as hashtags that match or contain that term.
Limited full-text search means the following: mountains.social has ElasticSearch configured. That means, that all post made on mountains.social are searchable (unless you posted them as "unlisted"). Post coming from other instances are not by default searchable by text. Only when the user configured his account to be searchable, these posts are included in the full-text search. You can configure this on the web interface: settings → Public profile → Privacy and reach → select "Include public posts in search results". This is deliberately an opt-in setting.
The best way to introduce yourself to the Fediverse and to your followers is to make an introduction post. This helps people you follow see who it is that followed them, and follow you back. Your introduction post should include a sentence or two about you, and include the #introduction hashtag (as well as #newhere or often used amongst German speaking users #neuhier), as well as any other hashtags relevant to your interests. Many people follow the #introduction hashtag to find newcomers to follow. It is recommended to include hashtags regarding your region, career, hobbies, and interests (but again, this is completely optional).
You are also able to “pin” up to 6 posts to the top of your profile, and it is recommended that your introduction post be one of these.
There are three main timelines on Mastodon: The Home Feed, the Local Timeline and the Federated Timeline.
The Home Feed is posts from users you follow, the posts they boost, and hashtags you follow.
The Local Timeline is public posts from people on your instance (mountains.social).
The Federated Timeline is all public posts from all users "known" to your instance. This means the user is either on the same instance as you, somebody on your instance follows that user or the post is coming in via one of the Relays.
Unlike Twitter, there is no algorithm on Mastodon. This allows for more meaningful, intentional, and genuine engagement.
Boosts are the best way to increase engagement. This will reshare the post on your profile for your followers to see and send a notification to the author.
Favorites (a.k.a. likes) will put the post in your favorites list, and send a notification to the author.
When you Bookmark a post it will be privately added to your bookmarks list without generating a notification.
Mastodon provides the ability to add alt text to images to make them more accessible. There is a large blind community that rely on alt text to get an idea what the pciture is about. When you upload an image to Mastodon, an Edit icon appears in the top right-hand corner of the image. Here you can add the alt text (up to 1500 characters).
It is highly encouraged to add alt text to your pictures. It is a small thing, but in this way everybody can enjoy your media.
Content Warnings (CWs) allow you to hide the content of your post behind a short description of the content. It is recommend to use CWs liberally when posting potentially disturbing or controversial content, e.g. spoilers, NSFW content, disturbing news, or politics. This can also be used to add a summary or subject for your post, to collapse long posts, or to otherwise provide context or setup for the body of the post.
When attaching images to your posts, please use “Mark Media As Sensitive” for sensitive images. This hides the full media behind a blurred thumbnail by default. When adding a CW to a post, attached media is automatically marked as sensitive.