How to bookmark a Mastodon post (and why you should)
One of the most challenging aspects of Twitter is the continuous nature of the Home page feed. If you find a post that is of interest, pause one second and it’s gone.Â
If you want to find that post, you better know who wrote it, so you can visit their account and scroll through their feed to locate it. If that person is a busy tweeter, you can be sure it might take some time to track it down.
Also: The best Twitter alternatives
There has to be a better way.
There is. And fortunately, for those who are migrating away from Twitter to Mastodon, that more efficient method has an analogous feature on both platforms.
I’m talking about post bookmarks.
What is this feature? It’s very much like the bookmarks you use on your web browser — a convenient method of saving a post so you can easily refer to it later. You may not have used the bookmark feature on Twitter, but Mastodon is different.Â
Also: How to delete your Twitter account and protect your data, too
Because you might be on a Mastodon server dedicated to a specific topic (such as Fosstodon is to open-source), the chances are far greater that you’ll find far more posts that are relevant to your interests. That means you’ll probably want to save those posts for later reference.
Trust me when I say that you’ll be glad you started using the feature when you did. Given the nature of Mastodon, I’ve found plenty of posts that I wanted to save for future reference — far more than I ever did on Twitter.
Let me show you how easy it is.
How to bookmark posts on Mastodon
The first thing to do is log into the Mastodon server of your choice. If you haven’t already done so, you’ll want to find a Mastodon server that covers a specific subject or join a general Mastodon. You can find a listing of servers on the official Mastodon site.Â
The next thing to do is find a post you want to save. For testing purposes, you can just locate any post, bookmark it, and remove the bookmark later. One thing to keep in mind is that, unless you wind up on a Mastodon server that’s almost as busy as Twitter, you won’t have to act nearly as fast because those posts aren’t going to zip past in the blink of an eye.
At the bottom of the post, you’ll see a bookmark icon (a vertical rectangle with a small triangle taken from the bottom edge). Click that icon and it will change to red to notate the post has been bookmarked.
If you find an interesting post you might want to refer back to later, bookmark it. Screenshot by Jack Wallen/ZDNET
Click on Bookmarks in the right sidebar to reveal all of the posts you’ve bookmarked. You can scroll through them at your pace, read through the comments, and reply whenever you need. You can come back at any time and reference those posts.
Sample Mastodon bookmarks I can view at any time (unless they are deleted by the original poster. Screenshot by Jack Wallen/ZDNET
When you’re done with a particular post, all you have to do is click the red bookmark icon to remove it from your Bookmarks page.
And that’s all there is to using the bookmarks feature on Mastodon. I highly recommend you start using this feature, as it will save you considerable time and effort in locating those posts you want to read or reference later.
