I started Mastodon, a popular social network, but I don’t know how to use it, so I started it for the purpose of learning French.

Suddenly, around last week, Wai Wai, a new social networking site called Mastodon

I’m not sure where the spark came from, perhaps ASCII or ITmedia were the first to cover this topic in Japan? In any case, I’ve been using Mastodon, a new social networking service, since last week, and I’ve been using it since the weekend. You can read more about it in the following net news.

ASCII.jp：Twitterのライバル？　実は、新しい「マストドン」（Mastodon）とは！

It’s open source, and individuals can set up their own Twitter-like servers and run their own local Twitter accounts. The server is called an instance, and you can get an account for each instance.

At the moment it looks like you can create an account in any of these instances.

スクリーンショット：https://instances.mastodon.xyz/list より

In this table, you can sort the list by clicking the column part of the list. Each time you click the column, the ascending and descending order is switched.

In which instance should I create an account?

To be honest, any instance will do, but I think it’s best to look at the score (calculated based on server stability, etc., formula unknown), number of users, etc., and find an instance that suits you.

Whether a high score is better or a large number of users is better because it is a major player, it seems that it is difficult to say. However, there are a lot of people who say that the « local timeline » and « allied timelines » are too fast and difficult to use or view.

Then, is it better to use it in a small scale with a small number of people? This has its own merits and demerits. On the one hand, the speed of the timeline will calm down, and it is safe because it is among friends who know each other well. In that case, your account will be lost.

How does it work -> Maybe people don’t really know lol

It’s still in its infancy and the world is still trying to figure out how to use it. When I look at the timeline, I feel like everyone is finding their own way to use it every day. It’s really fun to watch the process.

Incidentally, it looks interesting to be able to follow accounts in other instances, called « remote follow ». Basically, it’s a mechanism that is closed between individual instances, but it also includes a mechanism to look outside. It’s very well thought out. I think there’s a lot of room for interesting applications of this.

500 words is a merit, and I’m going to try to use it to learn French.

Now, I think another great feature of Mastodon is that the character limit for a single post (called a Toot) is 500 characters.

To be honest, at first I thought it was just a free Twitter, but this 500 characters gave me an idea that it could be used for learning French. Unlike Japanese, French and English require much more characters to tweet than Japanese, especially French is much longer than English. That’s why it’s necessary to use a lot of abbreviations and to make your tweets shorter than necessary. However, with 500 characters, you can write without worrying about such restrictions.

Furthermore, Mastodon is still in its infancy worldwide, and I imagined that early adopters would be kind enough to start at such a young age, so I took the liberty of getting an account on a French-speaking instance.

Then, as expected, there were many kind people. They take the time to correct my own posts! It’s like this.