Contents

• Following Other Users
• Hashtags on Moshidon
• Hashtags in the Browser

I recently wrote a blog post about Mastodon (in Dutch). Originally, I wanted to include this information there as well, but it became a bit much. Besides, this lends itself well to a separate post.

I wanted to show how I use Mastodon, because it can be difficult to truly make such a new medium your own. It took me some time, in any case.

Following Other Users

Once you’ve chosen a server (or instance, as Fediverse servers are sometimes called), you can get started. The first step is to follow interesting users, and here you’ll find a nice list of Dutch users who are worthwhile. You can also follow me, of course. I talk embarrassingly little about classical music (but just you wait, I have things planned!).

Hashtags on Moshidon

But then: where it really gets interesting is the hashtags. I personally hardly ever look at my actual Home page; what I like is following hashtags. The Android app Moshidon works very nicely for this.

This is what Moshidon looks like when I open the app:

Nice, it shows my tab with a collection of hashtags related to sewing. I find it a relaxing and creative hobby! The Great British Sewing Bee is totally my jam! Note that I don’t see the regular home page. Maybe there are posts about the current state of affairs in the world there, ugh. I’m not always in the right mood for that.

If I swipe left or right, I switch tabs. If I press ☕ Naaien ⌄ in the top left, I get this list to manually select the tab:

I couldn't find a more suitable icon than ☕. Oh well.

I have a lot of them, but that’s okay. Usually I don’t even use this menu but just swipe to the next tab when I’m done with it:

To create this, press ⋮ in the top left:

Then on Edit timelines. You will then see a list like this, probably only with Home, Local, and Federation. Here you press +.

Here you can set an icon (1) and the title of your tab (2). At 3 you enter the main hashtag, and at 4 you can add extra tags. Not at 5, otherwise you will only see messages that have both the tag at 3 and the tag at 5, and not just one of them. With 6 you can optionally filter out certain hashtags. For example, for my “Crafts” tab, I don’t want to see things about sewing, because I’ve already seen those.

Et voilà, you’ve added a tab!

For me, this is such an important feature that I actually can’t use most other Mastodon apps, as many do not support this.

Hashtags in the Browser

This is also possible on the computer, although in a slightly less elegant way, if you ask me:

This is the “Advanced Web Interface”. If you click on ⚙️ Settings on the website, the checkbox to enable this is almost at the very top.

Enabling the Advanced Web Interface.

You then get a column overview. If you click on a hashtag, it opens a new column:

By clicking on in the top right, the button to pin the column appears (with + Pin). If you click on Include addition tags for this column in the newly created column, you'll see a similar menu to the one in Moshidon.

Then you can horizontally scroll across a large page with all the hashtags:

(Tip: Hold down Shift and scroll with the mouse wheel to scroll horizontally!)

I would have preferred a menu with these kinds of hashtag collections, like in Moshidon, but hey, this works too.

Hopefully, this helped!