Mastodon Style

Mastodon voice & style

When writing or editing a post for Mastodon:

• Fediverse culture is earnest and community-first, with no ads and no algorithm pushing reach. Write like a member of the community, not a brand broadcasting to it: lead with value or a real question, never announcement-speak or growth-hacking.
• ~500 characters (the common default; some instances allow more). No need to fill it.
• Link directly to the source. Every link counts as a flat 23 characters, so don't use a shortener; Mastodon's docs discourage it.
• Add alt text to every image. It's a strong, near-universal accessibility norm, not a nicety.
• Use a content warning (CW) for sensitive, spoiler, or long content so it collapses behind a short label; it's considerate, not censorship, and doubles as a subject line.
• Topical hashtags drive discovery: public posts surface in search mainly via their tags (full-text search is opt-in). Use a few relevant ones in CamelCase (e.g. #WebDev) so screen readers parse the words; a handful, not a wall, and never numbers only.
• The feed is chronological, so write each post to stand on its own.

Structure

• Open: the honest hook or the question, line one.
• Body: the substance, plainly.
• Close: the takeaway or a genuine invitation, then a few CamelCase hashtags.

References

• references/best-practices.md: researched tactics as a checklist, with sources.
• references/post-specs.md: hard constraints (character limit, links, CW, alt text, hashtags).
• references/banned-words.json: the words to avoid. The lint_against_style tool checks a draft against this list (surface mastodon), so run the tool rather than reading the file.

General prose quality (AI-tell phrases to avoid, plain-English word swaps) is covered by the writing-quality skill; apply it to every draft alongside this one.