There are lots of guides explaining Mastodon and the broader fediverse, but they often go into way too much detail. So I've written this guide - it only talks about the basics you need to know to start using it, and you can then gradually learn the rest from other helpful fediverse users. Let's get started!

The fediverse is very different from Twitter, and that is by design. It's made for building close communities, not for building a "global town square" or as a megaphone for celebrities. That means many things will work differently from what you're used to. Give it some time, and ask around on the fediverse if you're not sure why something works how it does! People are usually happy to explain, as long as it's a genuine question. Some of the details are explained in this article, but it's not required reading.

The most important takeaway is the "

SSH into your EC2 instance. Run the following:

$ sudo yum install gcc This may return an "already installed" message. That's OK.

$ wget http://download.redis.io/redis-stable.tar.gz && tar xvzf redis-stable.tar.gz && cd redis-stable && make

See: http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonElastiCache/latest/UserGuide/GettingStarted.ConnectToCacheNode.Redis.html