Getting Started
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: Why is my timeline empty?
A: Unlike other services you may be used to there’s no forced content or algorithm populating your feed here. You can find content by searching for hashtags or following specific accounts. Some recommended accounts for following should show up when you register, for our local admin accounts and a favorite bot or two. Later on this page is a section called “Who to Follow” with some more tips.
Q: What are all these feeds?
A: On our website/app you have four basic feeds:
- Your “Home” timeline will only show posts from accounts that you’ve followed.
- The “Social” timeline includes replies and other interactions from those folks as well.
- The “Local” timeline is only accounts from our instance (firetribe.org)
- The “Global” timeline is all the posts that have been federated to the server from other instances.
Who to follow
Basic Tips: fedi.tips article
Shared Interests
Searching by hashtag will show any posts with that hashtag that your local instance has seen recently.
Some users have listed themselves in the Fediverse People Directory for search by the hashtags in their profiles.
Weather news (US National Weather Service)
The Mastodon server bots.krohsnest.com runs a bunch of bot accounts pulling National Weather Service bulletins from all local offices via the Iowa Environmental Mesonet. The accounts use the format @iembot_XXX@bots.krohsnest.com, with XXX being the 3 letter identifier for the local forecast office.
You can find your local forecast office identifier by searching your location at weather.gov and selecting the Local Forecast Office link under More Information. The URL at this page should end in the identifier for this local office, for example the forecast office for New York, NY is reachable at https://www.weather.gov/okx/ so the identifier in this case is okx. To follow this user I search for @iembot_okx@bots.krohsnest.com.
Source: https://www.patreon.com/posts/alternate-alerts-81852206