Fediview
Practical guidance for Mastodon timelines, fediverse tools, and the decentralised social web - written for people who want to actually understand how it works.
What Fediview Covers
Mastodon is not complicated, but it does work differently from every centralised platform you have used before. Federation changes how content moves. Instance choice affects what you see. Timeline types are not interchangeable. These are not edge cases - they shape your experience every day, and most guides skip past them.
Fediview covers the practical side: managing timelines without losing the thread, filtering content so your feed stays useful, and choosing tools that fit how you actually use the platform. There are also harder questions worth addressing - what happens to instance performance when you scale from 200 to 20,000 users, which discovery methods involve real trade-offs, and where the algorithmic timeline design choices affect what gets surfaced and what does not.
The guides here are written for people who have moved past the basics and want to understand the mechanics, not just the surface behaviour.
Key Resources
Plus
Deep dive into advanced timeline filtering, saved views, and exporting capabilities.
Best Tools for Mastodon
Identify top clients and utilities for optimising fediverse use.
What is Mastodon?
Get to know Mastodon's basics, its instances, and federation fundamentals.
What is the Fediverse?
Understand the decentralised social web and its interconnected nature.
FAQ
Find answers to common questions about Fediview and the fediverse.
Developer Notes
Access insights for building timeline products and fediverse tools.
Latest Updates
View all →Where to Start
Never used Mastodon before? The introduction guide covers the foundations, and the fediverse overview explains the broader ecosystem without assuming prior knowledge.
Already past the basics? The tools guide compares clients, discovery utilities, and moderation aids side by side. The Plus section goes further into filtering techniques and capabilities that rarely get documented properly elsewhere.
Developers working on timeline products or fediverse tooling should read the algorithmic timeline guide and developer notes, which cover technical constraints and the kind of trade-offs that only surface once you start building. If you are considering running your own instance, the external guide on hosting a Mastodon server covers the technical and hosting requirements in detail.
Timelines Are Not Just Streams
On centralised platforms, someone else decides what your feed looks like. On Mastodon, that responsibility shifts to you - which is the point, but it also means making decisions the platform does not make for you.
The Home, Local, and Federated timelines pull from different sources and behave quite differently as a result. Home reflects your follows. Local reflects your instance's community. Federated is broader and harder to predict. Treating them as interchangeable is one of the more common mistakes new users make. Lists compound this further - used well, they can reshape daily engagement far beyond what the default timelines offer.
Client choice matters too. The official web interface is functional, but it is not the only option, and for some workflows it is not even the best one. Beyond the interface layer, there are real mechanics worth understanding: how content is routed between instances through federation, how privacy considerations shift at scale, and where the various discovery methods introduce genuine trade-offs rather than just stylistic differences. That is what the guides here are built around.