Mastodon and the Fediverse have a number of common terms which you may not have heard of on other social networks. Here’s a guide:
- “Toots” are posts, the Mastodon equivalent of tweets. The mascot for Mastodon is a mastodon, an ancient relative of the elephant ⧉, and “toot” is sort of the sound an elephant makes. Programmers sometimes call them statuses.
- “Boosts” are shared posts, the Mastodon equivalent of a re-tweet. Programmers sometimes call them re-blogs. If you boost a post, it will appear in the home timelines of your followers.
- “CWs” are Content Warnings, used to hide a post underneath a title. There’s detailed info about them here including why they exist and how to use them.
- “Alt Text” means text descriptions on images, videos or audio clips that help make them accessible to disabled people.
- “Instances” are the sites you can sign up on on the Fediverse, also known as “servers”. They were also known as “communities” for a while, and some people call them “nodes”. On PeerTube they are now known as “Platforms”. All of these are just different names for exactly the same thing: the site you signed up on. If someone talks about Fediverse instances, they are talking about Fediverse servers, they are one and the same.
- “Birdsite” and “Hellsite” are nicknames for Twitter, sometimes indicated by a bird on fire (it’s a comment on how discussions on Twitter very often turn into horrible arguments). Hellsite is also sometimes used to mean other centralised social networks such as Tumblr, Facebook, TikTok etc.
- “Vanilla Mastodon” means standard unaltered Mastodon software, which most Mastodon servers use. Some servers use non-standard customised versions of Mastodon, such as Glitch or Hometown, and they work just as well as vanilla but tend to have more features and options.
- “Forks” are customised versions of server software, usually altered so that it can do something the standard version cannot do. For example the Glitch Mastodon fork of Mastodon allows users to write with rich text, something that isn’t possible on standard Mastodon.
- “Subtoot” means a post about someone that doesn’t actually mention that person.
- “LB” or “Last Boost” means someone has posted from their own account but is referring to someone else’s post they just shared a moment ago.
- “Pol” is an abbreviation for politics, most commonly used in content warnings on posts about politics.
- “PH” and “MH” are abbreviations for physical health and mental health, usually used if someone wants to put a content warning on a post about these topics.
- “EC” or “Eye Contact” is sometimes used in content warnings, as some people have difficulty or discomfort seeing people looking at the camera.
- “Sportsball” just means sport.
- “Defederate” is when one Fediverse server totally cuts off all connections with another server, usually if there is a profound and extreme disagreement about acceptable behaviour or content.
- The pineapple emoji 🍍 is a very old running joke on Mastodon whose origin is lost in the mists of time. There is no double meaning or hidden reference here, it’s just meant to be a fun thing that users sometimes include in their posts at random.