Universeodon Blog

This post makes me sad. I, an instance owner with a sizeable population of folks on it, didn’t quite comprehend the idea behind likes and presumed the world was experiencing the experience I was.

They weren’t.

Let’s explore a little bit about the realities of federation and what this means to our users. It’s not just like’s that have quirks around here.

People discovery is a hard problem to solve – and not necessarily for technical reasons. Over the past few months as people have migrated from Twitter to Mastodon, we’ve depended on twitter APIs and Twitter services to discover each other by posting our mastodon names in our twitter bios.

This worked great for a brief period, but for Mastodon to be a healthy network we need to make it possible to discover people by their profile pages in Mastodon. There is a constant threat of Twitter shutting down or charging money for APIs necessary to do this and quite frankly, we shouldn’t depend on Twitter or any other network for discovery here.

Mastodon already federates people and within this federated activity, there is an option to enable or disable being discovered. With this built-in support, we can implement searches to help people be discovered when they opt-in.

I like to work in the open and when I say open, I don’t mean people shoulder surfing me watching what I do and judging me, but open as in being honest, welcoming, expressing desires, sharing success, sharing failures, and keeping people abreast of things they may be interested in and chasing my interests. I try and do this for my job, my life, my friends, and my family. Working in the open helps me feel confident that feedback is accepting, intentions are honest, and goodness is rewarded and that I care!

Nuance is the key to success on Mastodon and it isn’t as hard as one would think. Doing business and being successful on mastodon requires you to focus on understanding the humans that are on the network, creating a profile people want to follow and writing content that people want to read while being a good “netizen”. Read on for some quick tips to being successful social media marketing on Mastodon.

I love to find things and explore and discover. I love the creativeness of users on mastodon and how many engineers, scientists, teachers, authors, makers and creators came on board to share their stories, their creations and their experiences – but it was always hard to discover these people at times and I wished that I could search for them in ways that are familiar on all the other social networks.

With the magnificent work of some open-source creators, we have been able to launch advanced search on Universeodon.com for authenticated users and I'll say – what an improvement it has made.

Not only did it make the web search experience extremely feature rich, but it also fixed the search experience on the official mastodon mobile apps where the people, posts and hashtags are correctly populated when people use search terms!