Welcome to Jax.Social! We're just getting off the ground, but here are a few steps you can take to get started:
* Add an avatar and bio! This makes it easier to connect with other people here.
* Make an #introduction post! Tell us a bit about yourself, so like-minded people can connect with you.
* Follow others! We're all friends here, so feel free to connect.
As for the Jax.Social platform itself, you'll notice it's very similar to Twitter, but with a few differences:
* A 500 character limit — much more room to talk.
* "Toots" instead of tweets — flatulence, but also the sound a Mastodon makes (we're powered by software called Mastodon).
* Content Warnings. Use this to give people a courteous warning before you share NSFW or overtly political content.
* Permanent usernames. Once you pick a username, that's the one that stays with you here.
Together, all these connected sites make up a global social network called the "fediverse."
If you're a nerd, you might want to know there's an underlying protocol called #ActivityPub that enables all of this. Besides microblogging, it also supports video sharing (via #PeerTube / https://joinpeertube.org), photo sharing (via #PixelFed / https://pixelfed.org), blogging (via #WriteFreely / https://writefreely.org), and much more.
You can learn a bit more about it here: https://fediverse.party/en/fediverse
@jaxsocial a longer list of #activitypub apps in various stages of development can be found in the staging area for @fediverseparty at this location:
https://git.feneas.org/feneas/fediverse/-/wikis/watchlist-for-activitypub-apps
Lastly, there's "federation." While you can follow other people in our community, you can also follow people from other communities, like this guy from a site called Writing Exchange: @matt. It works exactly like email: e.g. you can contact someone on Yahoo from your Gmail account.