How to open a Mastodon account? All about the free and open-source social network service!

Let us go directly into what actually is Mastodon and how can one create an account on the free, open source social networking site.

Mastodon is a free and open-source self-hosted social networking service. It allows anyone to host their own server node in the network, and its various separately operated user bases are federated across many different servers.

Recently a storm of references to Mastodon took over on Twitter India after a senior Supreme Court lawyer Sanjay Hegde’ account on the microblogging site got suspended.

Hegde after he was informed that his account would not be restored, in interviews to media outlets he said that he is thinking of joining other social media platforms like Mastadon to put forth his views. This began a trend of people joining Mastodon in solidarity with Hegde.

Let us now check what actually is Mastodon and how can you create an account on this social networking site.

What is Mastodon?

Mastodon is a free and open-source social networking service. Which allows users to host their own server node in the network, and its various separately operated user bases are federated across many different servers. These servers are connected, allowing users from different servers to interact with on another.

“Mastodon isn’t just a website, it is a federation – think Star Trek. Thousands of independent communities running Mastodon form a coherent network, where while every planet is different, being part of one is being part of the whole,” the homepage of the website says.

How to create an account on Mastodon?

Mastadon is a federated service, similar to email. Mastodon lets you sign up one of many sites that run under Mastodon software, called instances. You can communicate with the software users on different instances.

A good place to gather more information is by visiting Mastodon.social/about. This is the flagship instance for the service and has the most users. A whole list of other instances can be checked out at JoinMastodon.org.

You can signup with the aid of username, email address, and password. The full username at the website is seen as @[Username]@[MastodonInstance.Domain]

The default look for Mastodon is called Tootsuite. There is a 500 character limit for each Toot. When you want to post your views, just click the Toot button.

You can add an image or photograph by clicking the camera icon, pasting an image from your clipboard, or click and dragging a photo over the page. When you add an image, you can add a description for the visually impaired too. There is an eyeball icon to mark the image as NSFW.