Since a certain billionaire celebrity took over the social network Twitter, many users are concerned about its future. Some people are choosing to move away from the platform and many of them are looking at a social network called Mastodon.

Mastodon is very similar to Twitter. People can write posts (called “toots”) which can be replied to, liked and re-posted, and they can follow each other and use hashtags.

To sign up the first thing you must do is choose a server. There are loads of them and they are themed, often by interest.

Whichever server you choose you can still follow users across the entire Mastodon network. But it does give you a starting community who are more likely to post things you are interested in.

Here at Photosymbols we decided to sign up but couldn’t find a server community that really fitted. So we created our own - Learning Disability Social.

The server you choose becomes part of your user name - so for example, we used our current Twitter handle, @photosymbols making our user name @photosymbols@learningdisability.social. You can find us by searching for that address anywhere on Mastodon. Within the immediate server community it's even simpler as our user name is just @photosymbols.

Our Mastodon server is free to use and is now open for new accounts. So if you have been thinking about signing up to Mastodon why not join us at

https://learningdisability.social