@Robbie if I understand correctly you are about 15 years old, and you are out here to learn and looking at your possible future. If that's so it's great.

I don't give you advices, but I can answer (some) questions and I can share about what I've seen so far.

(This is a public post, anyone feel free to comment, by the way.)

So, I posted #newhere (again 😀) but skipped the (re)introduction. A short intro about me (or you can check the world of knowledge).

Kind of intro

I'm Hungarian and working with computers. But let me tell you how it went, since it's more relevant for you right now.
When I was a kid I met with my first computer, and I loved that it's a machine that does whan I tell it, and tried to write programs, which I still do. Apart from that I went through various computers until I met my true friend, the C=64. I have played a lot of games, and in parallel I did programming, so I was curious how the games worked, so learnt (by myself) assembly, and started to take programs apart, like cutting out and repacking music. 😀

Also, I learned English because of the text adventure games, so I had a notepad with the words I don't know, and a dictionary, and I wrote the meaning, and after a while I kind of remembered them. I remember most of them even now so people believe I speak English but in reality I only play a text-based adventure where they are the NPCs. 😀

Then I met a real programming language (apart from assembly and BASIC) and it looked weird, and I was curious so learned C. For fun.

Then come the IBM PC age, and in my school there was a computer, which was even faster, so started playing games there (Larry, I'm looking at you!), which was pretty useful for learning more English. But then these machines had even more interesting programming languages (like Pascal, but fun was to check Forth, Prolog and Smalltalk), so half of my time was spent programming, creating various little fun stuff ranging from simple drawing program to simple games.

There was no internet, but I met the first modem and I was also hooked by the possibility to connect remote machines and transfer data (games!) so I spent some more money on modems, which lead to creating my first open online free community resource: a BBS. There it went on: I virtually met a lot of nice people, met a lot of intersting programs (shareware, freeware), I knew a bit English, I knew a bit programming... I wasn't bored.

And it have determined me to learn the stuff I loved to do, which was about computers, interconnects, programming... so I went to college learning about just that. (It was not an easy ride, but that's another story, and Hungarian education used to be free back then, so I didn't have to generate debts.) And college wasn't an university so I got a lot of useful knowledge apart from theory.

Then I got some whatever job, mainly to cover my hobbies. So I ran my BBS, and then Internet came, so it was just logical to create an ISP using those modems. And meeting new people (and hanging on iRC a lot, and talking with everybody). And it leads to new friends, some of them asking me to join their companies, do new jobs, larger scale, more money, more interesting tasks, larger stuff, faster stuff, .... and it just goes on and forward.

In the meantime (apart from the work where I do what I like) I meet people introducing me to new hobbies. And I find new projects on the internet. Like, I found google before it was Google and was amazed by the idea of the ranking, or created part of DMoz just because I wanted to share. And then I happened to find the English #Wikipedia and thought it would be nice to have a Hungarian one so I have created it. And it grew pretty big today (both English and Hungarian). And I met again a huge lot of people through all these hobbies. And some of them became jobs.

Or, I like to bike, and I found a nice map project, also free and open, so I started to edit OSM. And it grew as well, and I meet a lof of people through that hobby project, where I give away my work for free. Some of them asking for my knowledge and willing to pay for that.

You see, all the jobs I get paid for are based on stuff I gave away for free. And the people I met through it. And that people have seen what I can so and asked me to do that for them for money. It worked out pretty well. Giving away stuff for free I mean. 😀

Moral of the story? Learn. Be open. Talk to smart and worthy people (and do not waste too much time on the stupid and no-good ones). They may find what you can do worthy.

• Mastodon is a 1:1 #Twitter clone, just without Elon Musk, but otherwise absolutely identical to Twitter. I mean, how could a microblogging service possibly be any different from Twitter? That's just as strange an idea as a desktop operating system that isn't exactly like Windows. Unless you're a Mac user, that is.
  
• Mastodon.social is Mastodon. Because that's the website you've been pointed at on Twitter.
  
• Also, the Fediverse = Mastodon. Only Mastodon.

• You've got three timelines. Next to your personal timeline which lists whatever your contacts have tooted or boosted, there's the local timeline which lists what the other users on your instance have tooted or boosted (this is how and why special interest instances or local instances make sense), and there's the federated timeline which is the local timeline plus what local users' contacts on other instances have tooted or boosted.
  There is, however, no timeline for the entire Fediverse.
  
• There's no full-text search for the entire Fediverse. Deal with it.
  
• There's no secret algorithm telling you what to read or whom to follow. All timelines are strictly chronological.
  
• This also means that there's no secret algorithm shoving your toots into other people's faces. If you want people to discover your toots, use #hashtags. On Twitter, hashtags are a gimmick. In the Fediverse, they're vital.
  
• There's a #newhere hashtag. It matters. As someone who is new here, you're expected to write an introduction, use the #newhere hashtag in it and then pin your introduction so that it's always on top or near the top of your personal timeline for others to read.
  
• There's no quote retweet. And there will never be. Eugen Rochko has a very strong opinion on that, he doesn't want that popular trolling tool on Mastodon, so this won't happen.
  
• Privacy settings per toot. You can choose who can read your toot. If you write threads, it's common practice to only set the first toot to public and all other ones to unlisted so that they don't clutter the public timelines.
  
• Delayed toots. You can choose when your toot goes out.
  
• Content warnings (CW) that blank out your toot. And yes, they're taken very seriously. People are likely to demand you use them when you don't.
  
• Alt-text for images. Again, people are likely to demand you create them when you don't. Some people on the Fediverse are blind and use screen readers, and they, too, want to know what that picture in your toot is.
  
• Not to mention that toots can be almost twice as long as tweets, namely 500 characters. Unless the owner of an instance has changed that number.

• Not all of them are "not Twitter clones", i.e. microblogging services. Pleroma is another one which was created out of disagreements with how Mastodon works. Akkoma is a Pleroma fork which came to exist because someone didn't like where Pleroma went. There's also Misskey. Obviously, they aren't "Mastodon clones" either, they were designed to be different from each other. And there's GNU social, the oldest one on the list.
  
• Pixelfed is "not an #Instagram clone".
  
• Friendica is definitely "not a #Facebook clone" because, while created for a similar purpose, it's still vastly different. And it federates with just about everything that moves including e-mail or WordPress. It even used to federate with Facebook itself eons ago. By the way, #Friendica makes everything possible that I've done in this post which is also why it's usually filed under "macroblogging". But I'm not on Friendica; I'll get to that. Also, Friendica is the second-oldest one on the list.
  
• Mobilizon is "not a #GoogleCalendar or #Doodle clone".
  
• Funkwhale is "not a #SoundCloud or #BandCamp or #Spotify clone", also because you're unlikely to find mainstream commercial music on it. Castopod: ditto, but specialising on podcasts.
  
• PeerTube is "not a #YouTube clone".
  
• Owncast is "not a #Twitch clone".
  
• Lemmy is "not a #Reddit or #HackerNews clone", although the "not a Reddit clone" part can be debated.
  
• WriteFreely and Plume are "not #Medium clones".
  
• BookWyrm is "not a #GoodReads clone".
  
• Flockingbird is "not a #LinkedIn clone" at all, also because rather than being a service of its own, it piggybacks on the rest of the Fediverse by picking up hashtags.
  
• Hubzilla was a successor to Friendica, but it's much more than "not a Facebook clone". It's also not a clone of whichever CMS and/or cloud service you use. It can provide you with your own personal organiser including a #CalDAV calendar (next to the public event calendar) and a #CardDAV addressbook, your own #WebDAV cloud space, your own online photo album, your own website, your own blog and/or your own wiki on top of just about everything that Friendica does. It's the third-oldest on the list and still older than Mastodon.
  
• And there's much more.

happy birthday home! ♥ ♥ ♥

September 15, 2010 → September 15, 2022