With the takeover of Twitter by the world’s richest man, which has led to a surge in hate speech, the reinstatement of white supremacist, fascist and neo-Nazi accounts, and the bannings of numerous anti-fascist accounts, WCH has been prioritising expanding our presence on Mastodon, an alternative, open source social media platform. This is our quick guide on how you can get on Mastodon and follow us.
Unlike centralised platforms run by large corporations like Twitter, Instagram or Facebook, Mastodon is a decentralised platform. This does make it a little more complex than Twitter, but once you have it figured out it works very similarly.
This means that rather than have one central Mastodon website, Mastodon has lots of separate, self-managed “instances”. So to join Mastodon, you first need to choose an instance.
A large general Mastodon instance you can join is Mastodon.world. Alternatively you can search for a more specific or special interest instance here.
Then as a first step you can follow us! Just click your #Explore tab and paste our username into the search box, then click follow. This is our username: @workingclasshistory@mastodon.social
If you currently have a Twitter account, you can then use a tool like this to find all of your current Twitter friends on Mastodon and follow them: Movetodon
If you still want to keep your Twitter account for the time being, like us, then you can also use a simple tool like this Crossposter to automatically post all of your posts from one platform to the other: https://crossposter.jaxbeach.social/
