There's definitely stuff about Mastodon I don't get. Like, OK, I have this account here, cool. I know I can follow people from other sites. But how do I log in to other sites to see them? I know I can "redirect", my account but presumably I'm not meant to do that every time I want to look at another site (and then disable every time I want to come back)?
@TatraT815 Hello! I think if I understand your question correctly I might be able to answer. So accounts on the fediverse are a bit like email - someone using gmail can email someone using hotmail or whatever, you don't need a hotmail account to email someone on hotmail. So usernames come in two bits: @username@instance.address. So I'm @cassolotl @queer.party (I split it up so it doesn't automatically get tidied up into @cassolotl but they're the same!) When you click/view/follow any username from any instance.
I think I'm understanding this a bit better, thank you :)
So if I want to access multiple Mastadon servers' timelines, I need an account per-server. But if I by some method have someone's name on a given server, I can follow that from any of my accounts on any server. Is that about right?
@TatraT815 There's also the "federated timeline" (don't recall if that's displayed automatically!) which will show you the toots from your own instance plus all people followed by other folks on your instance, I believe. It's not a Twitter-style global view (that's difficult-to-impossible to achieve in a federated system like Mastodon), but should hopefully provide some places to explore :)
@TatraT815 Yep, pretty much! It's *very* close to e-mail actually, in how it works (though *technically* speaking the protocol part is ActivityPub and Mastodon is just a client)
@joepie91 Yeah, I'm just getting my head around that Mastodon isn't a *platform*, it's a *protocol*, like email or IRC, so I shouldn't expect everything to just interconnect in a way that's not intended or possible :)