Toot actions and read posts on Mastodon

I get pretty active at reading mastodon posts and I developed a sense for the actions available on each toot.

There are four basic actions on Mastodon: reply, boost, favorite and bookmark. There are some debate about how to use these four. I see in contrast a clear usage.

Reply is evident and does not come into debate: you post a toot after someone else’s toot.

A boost is for toots I am fond of and similar to me. I want these toots to have more reach.

The Favorites are a kind of appreciation. Good toot. The reach of the toot will remain the same though.

The last Bookmark action is only a way to temporary store toots for me. Sometimes because I want to link them on shaarli or because I want to share them with someone else.

Another way to get more toots to read is to follow tags. Yes we can do it on Mastodon and I have the feeling the feature is underused. For example, I want to follow rust programming toots: I have the (misused) #rust and the (correct) #RustLang for it. Here’s what it looks like on the elk inteface: You can see a tag icon ”#” (in the navigation bar). This icon leads to the list of followed tags. “#rustlang” lead to the list of posts.

That’s how I use mastodon at the moment.