Best Apps & Secret Tricks for Mastodon

I have three tips for people moving over to Mastodon

So a lot of the Apple community of content creators, writers, developers

podcasters, and peasants, and ordinary fans, have all moved over from Twitter to Mastodon

I've been using it for a few months now, so I have some tips for all the newcomers. Tip number one, don't worry so much about which instance you pick

There's no singular Mastodon that you sign up for. Just like email, you have to pick a specific server

Now you can still follow anybody from anywhere. There's no real limitations there

Most of the servers are completely free. But if you want to get on mastodon.social, which is the biggest one

you can use Kaltimax Invitation Link if you click there or in the video description

There is actually one hitch that you need to think about. So if you have somebody's profile open in Safari and you want to follow them

you can only press the follow button if you're on the same instance

Otherwise, you need to open their profile. You need to open their profile as it appears on your own instance

It sounds complicated and annoying because it is, but that brings me to tip number two

I have a few ways you can work around this. So I'm looking at this account in Safari

and it's hosted on Mastodon. Dot Social. Now I can't just tap the follow button

it won't do anything, because Mastodon social isn the server that manages my account But I have a few third apps on my phone to make that really easy You tap the share button scroll down a little bit and I have these three actions right here

because I have these three third-party apps on my phone. So I can just tap Open in Mona

And there it is, I can see that I'm already following them. It's really that simple

Now you might not want to be thrown out to another app and you might want to stay inside Safari

Well, the king of shortcuts himself, Federico Vitici, has a solution for you

You tap the share button, and I have this series shortcut called Masto Redirect

You tap it, and in a new tab, it opens up the same profile on the same account

and I can see that I'm already following them. Both of these are so convenient and effective

that the whole follow people from your own instance problem might as well not exist

Tip number three. So while Twitter is charging people money for the privilege of keeping their account secure

You can set up two-factor authentication on territorial on for free really easily

It's the best kind of security because it keeps your account way more secure

And it's so well integrated into the iPhone and the Mac that it's a completely invisible process

Let me show you how to set it up. Now say I have this account here and I want to add two-factor authentication

Well, you tap the settings button. You tap this menu and you go to account Then you tap this menu again and you go to Two Factor Off and you tap Setup Now you can bring up the QR code on a computer and then scan it with your phone but I doing this all in my iPhone

So I'm just going to copy this code right here. Then you open up settings, and you scroll down to passwords

Then you want to scroll down and open up the password for your Mastodon account, and you tap Setup Verification Code

This is where you'd scan the QR code if you have two devices. But I'm just going to tap Enter Setup Key and paste what I copied earlier

And tap, OK. Then you'll get this verification code here. You copy that

And you can see that it's already recommending it. So you just tap this. It'll do Face ID again

And there you go. Now you'll be given these two factor codes. You'll want to like screenshot these or write them down somewhere or keep them somewhere else

so if you ever lose access to your device, you can still get into your account

But don't bother trying to hack this account. It'll already be deleted by the time this video is published

Wait, one more thing. You can follow a cult of Mac on Mastodon. We post all of our news

reviews, how-toes, setups, guides, all on Mastodon as soon as they're published

And you can follow me on Mastodon. For some reason. Wait wait one last thing I going to go through some of my favorite apps that I been trying out Ice Cubes is free and open source for iPhone iPad and Macs with Apple Silicon

And it's a pretty good app. It has all the basic features. The official Mastodon client is available for iPhone and Android

If Android compatibility matters to you, being the official app, it supports all the basic features, as you can expect

It looks and works pretty similarly to the website. Mona is the one I'm trying out for iPhone, iPad, and Mac, even on the internet

Intel Macs. What I love about this one is that the timeline sync between the iPhone and the Mac

is like lightning fast. I didn't even think that ICloud was capable of syncing anything that

fast. It isn't officially released on the app store yet, but you can find links to join the test

flight in the video description. Ivory by TapBots is resurrected from the bones of tweetbot

which was one of the most popular Twitter clients. This is very well polished, very well designed

and easily the most reliable one that I've tried out so far. A Mac version is coming, but it's not available yet

and you can buy it right now in the app store. Mammoth is another one for iPhone and Mac by Shihab Mababub

This one is very fully featured. Easily the most pro features of any of the apps I've tested so far

and it looks very much at home on the iPhone. So those are all of my Mastodon tips

You can find links to everything I talked about in the video description. I'm De Griffin Jones with Cult of Mac