If you are a Mastodon admin and you need to communicate directly with your server’s members, there are several ways you can get in touch. Different methods are appropriate for different situations, so you might want to keep all of them in mind as options.
How to make non-urgent server announcements
There’s a built-in admin tool which lets you add an announcement to the top of all your members’ timelines.
- Log into your admin account on your server’s website
- Select ⋯ More
- Select Administration
- Select Announcements
- Click New Announcement
- Fill in the announcement text
- If you want to, optionally add start or end dates/times, or a posting date/time. If you don’t fill these in, the announcement will be posted immediately and remain there until you deactivate it.
- When you’re happy, click Create Announcement. The announcement will be posted according to the settings in the previous step. When it’s published, it will appear as a megaphone icon at the top of members’ Home timelines that they can click open.
⚠️ How to make extremely urgent server announcements
There is an emergency system built into Mastodon which lets you email all your server’s users directly. This is ONLY for extremely urgent situations such as server closure announcements, data breaches etc.
The emergency system is NOT for routine announcements, because most users would regard unsolicited non-urgent emails as spam.
- Create the urgent announcement using the same process detailed above for non-urgent announcements
- After the urgent announcement has been published, go back to Administration > Announcements, find the urgent announcement and click on “✉️ Notify Users” below it.
- A preview of the email will appear, check if it is correct. When you’re satisfied with the email, click “Send (X) emails”. This will email all your server’s users with the urgent announcement, using the email addresses on their accounts.
As stated above, MASS EMAILING IS ONLY FOR URGENT ANNOUNCEMENTS. If you use an emergency email system for non-emergency announcements, people will start blocking and/or reporting it, and you will lose the ability to communicate with your users when a real emergency happens. Users may even leave your server completely because of it.
Providing casual server news for those who want it
If you want to provide regular news posts about your server that aren’t urgent, you could have a dedicated public “server news” account which members can follow and/or check. Many people use the server’s main admin account for this. Whatever account you use, you can set it to be automatically recommend to new members.
Server news accounts typically post updates about things like scheduled maintenance, software updates, how to use server features etc. They can also be used to gather feedback from members about how the server is run, and discuss server news with users.
Sending official warnings to members who are doing bad stuff
If there’s a member of your server who has done something bad but you don’t yet want to restrict their account, you can send them an official private warning about it.
- Log into your server website with your admin account
- Click on ⋯ More
- Click on Moderation
- Click on Accounts (NOTE: this means “Accounts” in the “Moderation” section, it is not to be confused with your own personal “Account” option)
- Click on the username of the member you want to send a warning to
- Click on Warn
- Tick or un-tick the box for also sending the warning by email
- For the text of the warning itself, you can either use an existing pre-written warning preset, or write a new one-off custom warning. Custom warnings can be written in the Custom Warning box, warning presets can be selected from the Use A Warning Preset dropdown menu. (If there aren’t any preset warnings, click on the Add Warning Presets link above the custom warning box to create one.)
- When you’ve finished writing or selecting a warning, click Perform Action to send the warning
If the member fails to take notice of the warning, you can escalate the moderation to restrict or suspend the account instead. These further options are shown on the same page used for sending warnings.
Contacting a specific member about something that isn’t related to moderation
If you need to discuss something with a specific member on your server but it’s not a moderation issue, you can DM them just like you would any other account.
If a member is not responding to DMs, if the matter is urgent you can find the member’s email address on their moderation accounts page. Note that this is only to be used in urgent cases related to the member’s account on your server. You should not email members in non-urgent cases.