social.growyourown.services is one of the many independent Mastodon servers you can use to participate in the fediverse.
Single-user Mastodon instance for the Grow Your Own Services site

Server stats:

5
active users

As well as filling in your profile, it's a really good idea to also pin an introduction post about yourself to your profile.

Pinned posts let you write a lot more than profile texts, and let you attach photos, audio or video. You can even reply to your own pinned post to create a pinned thread.

More info including how to pin posts:

➡️ fedi.tips/how-do-i-pin-my-post

For technical reasons, pinned posts and pinned threads are distributed much more widely than ordinary posts.

fedi.tipsHow do I pin posts on my Mastodon profile? | Fedi.Tips – An Unofficial Guide to Mastodon and the Fediverse
More from Fedi.Tips
@FediTips Is it possible to do this on Friendica as well? I didn't see this as an option. Also, this is unrelated, so I apologise. But why is it that, whenever I post links, they are constantly shortened? When I see the post, either in TweeseCake where I'm editing it, or on my page on Friendica, I can't click on the link that I added and have it work. (that and it never shows up as I typed it.

@dandylover1

I think Friendica supports pinned posts, but @hypolite would be able to confirm that.

On the other issue about the links, really interesting to hear how TweeseCake behaves.

Long links are displayed in a shortened version so that they are easier to read for sighted people, but the actual full links are supposed to be there in the code of the post, so that when people click on them the link opens.

Are you unable to open these links in TweeseCake?

@hypolite @FediTips In Tweesecake, when I go to edit my post, instead of seeing the post as I wrote it, it's shortened. Even if I copy and paste that post into my browser, it doesn't work. If I go to my page in Friendica, it does the same thing, showing the shortened version. I'm not sure what sight would have to do with the length of lengths. Both can be clicked on. I thought it had to do with the character limit on other sites, but I'm not sure how that would affect Friendica.
Fedi.Tips

@dandylover1

Very long links can feel a bit distracting to sighted readers, that's why they are displayed in a shortened form. This causes the problem that if you copy-paste the post the links get broken.

The character limit isn't an issue, at least on Mastodon, because all links count as 23 characters no matter how long they really are.

@FediTips I must modify my earlier statment somewhat. Amazon links do wwork. I'm not sure if others do, as I will need to test it. But while they are shortened, even entering them that way in my browser brings me to the correct destination. I just don't want to spread false information, especially considering how hard you work to present the truth.

@dandylover1

Don't worry, please do keep giving feedback if there is a problem!

Especially keen to hear about any problems from screen reader users, as sighted developers sometimes overlook audio users.