Terminology

We don’t really care what you call your tweets here on Project Mushroom, but you will see some specific terms while using the Mastodon platform. Here is a description of some key terms: 

• Toot: A post. It can be text, an image, a link, or whatever Mastodon allows you to post. It’s a lot like a tweet on Twitter. The character limit here is 500. You can also edit your posts!

• Boost: A retweet or share. You post another user’s content on your timeline. Currently there is no support for “quote retweet”. That’s a Mastodon thing.

• Instance: Mastodon is different from Twitter or Facebook in that you connect to a specific community and follow their rules and configuration. You don’t see everyone that’s using Mastodon–only those on the same instance as you.

That said, these communities can still interact through what’s called federation.

• Federation: How Mastodon instances and even other platforms interact with one another. Currently, federation is disabled for Project Mushroom, but we have a federated instance you can join called Spore. People on Spore can interact with both Project Mushroom and the wider Mastodon community. For more details on Spore, see Choose your mushroom: public or private. For more information on federation, see Mastodon’s explanation: https://mastodon.help/#Federation.

• Favorite vs Bookmark: Favorites are public and bookmarks are private. With favorites, authors and others can see who and how many people favorited a post. With bookmarks, no one can see who or how many people bookmarked a post.