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.
For now, the community doesn't have open registration. We're trying to start with a close group of people who are interested in seeing this succeed, and then slowly growing it from there.
If you join and know others who would be interested, please invite them! You can create a special signup link to send out on this page: https://jax.social/invites
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.
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.
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