Quick Start

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All the details are present on the home page, but if you’re the type to get started and figure it out later… well then we already know why you’re here, don’t we?

1) Create an account & do the obvious stuff

Pedestal.social is invitation only. (hope you have one!) Set a display name, pick a username (this will be your handle, e.g., @luke@pedestal.social), upload an avatar photo, maybe a banner, give yourself a bio. Just let us know you now exist in this digital space.

2) Install an app

For iOS, I highly recommend Ice Cubes or Ivory. Those are both iPad compatible as well, which means you can install them on your Mac as a local client. 🙂 For Android, I don’t have direct experience but may I recommend Tusky or Tooot. More apps for these and other platforms are listed on Mastodon’s site and you can always log in on the web at pedestal.social.

3) First Toot!

Start a new post in whichever app you’re using and announce the joyous news!! If you’re feeling it, write an #introductions post for anyone out there in the fediverse. It’s a good way to be found/followed by others outside Pedestal, if you’re into that sort of thing.

4) Set some settings

Boring, I know. But take a second now and then you won’t have to think about them again.

Set default post permissions

If you want your posts visible to anyone on the internet, choose Public & Federated as your defaults. This makes your posts discoverable by anyone on any server and anyone can view them on your profile whether they’re logged in or not. This is the default for new accounts on Pedestal.

If you’re here just to talk to people on Pedestal, choose Public & Local-only as your defaults. This makes your posts visible & discoverable only on Pedestal.social. Public means your posts will be visible in the Local Timeline even to people on Pedestal who don’t follow you. If you reply to a post from another server, it will be federated by necessity.

“Allow my posts…” checked = Federated; Unchecked = Local only
“Allow my posts…” checked = Federated; Unchecked = Local only

5) Finding people to Follow

Finding people to follow on Pedestal is easy. Finding people to follow that aren’t on Pedestal is a little more of a process because Pedestal doesn’t know about every other Mastodon instance by default; there’s no centralized list of all public servers (decentralized, remember?). But that doesn’t mean there aren’t some good ways to find people!

Movetodon - if you’re coming from Twitter - can surface Mastodon accounts for people you follow on Twitter.

Trunk allows you to mass-follow a bunch of people from listed topics. Note that each user has placed themselves on this list and you might have to poke around some dead profiles to find someone interesting.

pytrunk lets you quickly follow a bunch of people from Trunk’s lists using some fine tunable parameters, if you’re handy with CLI & Python.

joinmastodon.org maintains a list of servers organized by topic. This is cool because you can visit the server’s Public timeline and find people to follow there. Whatever the base url is, just add /public/local to see all Public posts from people on that server (e.g., pedestal.social/public/local). Find people you like and follow to your heart’s content!

Quick note about this: if you’re viewing someone’s profile on their own server (pedestal.social is not in the url), you won’t be able to follow them immediately. Imagine trying to email a gmail.com address from your protonmail.com address. If you go to gmail.com, you’re not gonna get anywhere. You need to go to your account on protonmail.com then tell it the address of the person you want. Similarly here, all you need to do is copy the URL of the person’s profile, go back to your account on pedestal.social, and put that in the search. You should see the profile and be able to follow.