Up until now our main means of communication outside the site during e.g. downtime has been via our Twitter account. Given 
's innovative destruction of Twitter as a serious or reliable platform, we'll be using a Mastodon account going forward: @hexbear@matapacos.dog.
If you're on Mastodon already, please give us a follow! And if you're not, you should sign up! https://toots.matapacos.dog is an instance hosted by our very own @PorkrollPosadist@hexbear.net. See you on Mastodon folks 😎
matapacos is just a nice space in general, so definitely worth checking out!
How do I browse the list of users? I only got like three recommendations and those accounts are not used much. Mastodon's lack of search and quote tweets and stuff really bums me out. Often I feel like I'm looking at less information than I want, and need several clicks to get to it. Or it turns out like quotes, they turned it off!
https://toots.matapacos.dog/directory (then tick the "From matapacos.dog only" button)
This link can be found in the bottom left corner, near the about links and software version and whatnot. All recent activity will be also be sorted chronologically in the local feed if you are looking for people who are active.
Quote tweets are probably never coming in official mastodon, but some other compatible federated softwares have them, along with some Mastodon forks (not Hometown though :/).
The search function in Mastodon is unique. CURRENTLY, you opt-in to making your posts searchable by including hashtags, and people search for hashtags. There is a text search function, but it only searches posts you have already liked, boosted, or bookmarked. The text search is mainly useful for digging up an old post you remember liking. It was deliberately designed not to search the whole network to prevent trolls from namesearching and jumping into people's conversations.
This appears to be changing soon though. I think they are going to make it do full text search of everything which is known to the instance. There are mixed feelings about this naturally.
Discovery and getting started on Mastodon is a bit rough. It is not very convenient to lurk. You basically need to follow people, engage, and post, because the source of discovery is mainly through other users. Sometimes you get lucky on hashtags or the federated feed, but generally you need to start by following people from the local timeline and seeing the stuff they boost.
Yeah I know, it's incredibly stupid and because people have already made their mind up about how technology is corrupting people you can't argue with it lol