Zine Party Mastodon - WTF?

So you've been invited to join the Zine Party Mastodon instance and you might be asking yourself, "what the fuck is that?" Let me try to answer, explain why you might want to use it, and show you how to get started.

What is Mastodon?

Mastodon is a Twitter-style social network that's been around since 2016. You post relatively-short status updates, and get a list of your friends' status updates. Here's mine - it looks a lot like Twitter.

Mastodon is different than most other social media sites

Instead of being owned and run by one large tech company, each Mastodon instance (also called a server) is independent and mostly run and operated by volunteers.