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User guide

How to use Nextcloud Social as a person with an account on this Nextcloud: getting onto the fediverse, following people, writing and reading posts, and looking after the account. It describes the web client that comes with the app; where something is only reachable through the Mastodon-compatible API or a Mastodon client, it says so.

Verified against: app version 0.19.95, master, 2026-09-15 — every claim below was checked against the code of that tree. Menu and button names are the English strings of the web client.

Contents

Getting an account

There is no sign-up. A Nextcloud account is the account: the first time you open Social from the app menu, a fediverse identity is created for you — depending on the version, straight away or after a short screen asking whether you want one. Your handle is your Nextcloud user id — or, where that is not a valid handle, a lower-cased copy of it with anything outside letters, digits, _, . and - turned into an underscore — and your address is @handle@your-nextcloud-host. Anyone on Mastodon, Pixelfed, PeerTube or any other server that speaks ActivityPub can follow it.

Your display name and avatar come from your Nextcloud account and are changed there. The rest of the profile — banner, bio, profile fields — is edited in Social (see Managing your account).

On the first visit the app shows a four-step introduction: your address with a copy button, people to follow, a way to bring the follows you already have from another server, and a button that puts you in the composer. Every step can be skipped, and once closed it does not come back.

Finding and following people

  • Search. The search box at the top of the sidebar looks through the people, hashtags and posts this server knows. Somebody this server has never met is found by their full handle, @user@example.org: the app resolves it over WebFinger and shows the account.
  • Discover (in the sidebar) has six tabs: People (suggestions, with the people who share your Nextcloud and have said where they are on the fediverse listed first under On your Nextcloud), Starter packs, Pictures and Videos being looked at, Hashtags that are trending, ranked over a window you pick, and News — the articles being shared here most often in that window, each with the number of posts that carried it and a way into what those posts said.
  • Find people across the fediverse sits at the top of the People tab. Type a name, a handle or a subject and this server asks several directories at once — its own first, then the ones its administrator configured — and offers a Follow on every row. Pick one directory with the buttons under the box to ask only that one. Servers that did not answer are named under the results, so a short list is never mistaken for an empty fediverse. Somebody this server already knows opens here; a stranger opens on their own server.
  • Starter packs are named handfuls of accounts with a Follow everyone button. Two ship with the app — the projects behind the network, and photography — and an administrator can curate more.
  • Follow on a profile, in search results or on a Discover card sends a follow request. On an open account it is accepted at once; on a locked account the button reads Requested until the owner answers. Unfollow asks you to confirm, because on a locked account you would have to ask again.
  • Followed hashtags. A hashtag timeline (#tag in a post, or a trending tag) has a follow button; following a tag puts the public posts carrying it into your home feed. It is not a relationship with anybody, and the tags you follow are listed above any hashtag timeline.
  • Coming from another server? Every Mastodon-like server exports the people you follow as following_accounts.csv, and Pixelfed as pixelfed-following.json. Upload it in the first-run introduction or under Settings → Migration and each account is followed again from here.

Writing a post

New post at the top of the sidebar, or n, puts the caret in the composer; the composer also sits above most timelines. A post may be up to 5,000 characters, content warning included. What you type is kept as a draft across a failed post, a reload or a navigation, so nothing is lost to a network hiccup.

  • Visibility is chosen with the globe menu next to the post button. The choice decides who receives the post on the fediverse, not only who sees it here:
    • Public — visible to everyone; appears in the Local and Global timelines of every server it reaches, and on your profile to anyone.
    • Unlisted — visible to everyone who has the link or follows you, but kept out of public timelines and discovery features.
    • Followers — delivered to your followers only. It cannot be boosted, pinned or quoted, because those would carry it to people it was not written for.
    • Direct message — delivered to the people mentioned in it and nobody else. The button will not send a direct post without at least one @mention.
  • Mentions and hashtags. Type @ and the first letters of a name to pick an account, or # for a hashtag; both are also recognised when typed in full. A mention makes that person a recipient of the post; a hashtag makes the post part of that tag's timeline everywhere it is delivered.
  • Content warning. The speech-bubble button adds a warning field. Readers see the warning and a Show more button; the body stays out of the page until they ask. Attachments on a post with a warning are treated as sensitive. Warnings written on other servers are honoured here the same way.
  • Attachments. Up to ten per post: pictures (JPEG, PNG, GIF, WebP, AVIF, and HEIC/HEIF from a phone, converted on the way in), video (MP4, WebM, QuickTime) and audio (MP3, AAC, OGG/Opus, WAV, FLAC). Drag them in, use Add attachment, or Add from Files to attach something already in your Nextcloud without uploading it again — the Files app's own menu also has Share to Social for the same thing. Every picture has its Exif metadata (including the location a phone writes) removed before it is stored or sent anywhere. A picture can be given one of eight mild filters, previewed live and baked into the copy that is posted.
  • The GIF button opens a picker with 881 animated emoji in it, searchable by name — "party", "sad", "hedgehog" — plus whatever your administrator has added for this instance, which comes first. Nothing you type goes anywhere but your own Nextcloud, and neither does your browser: your server keeps its own copy of every picture it has been asked for. Picking one attaches it to the post you are writing, exactly as though you had uploaded it.
  • Alt text. Each attachment has a Describe this for people who cannot see it field. Posting with an undescribed attachment shows a nudge, never a refusal.
  • Polls. Add poll gives two to four options, a Multiple choice switch and a duration from 30 minutes to 7 days. Readers on any server vote; the totals come back and are shown under the poll, with when it closes or that it has.
  • Emoji. The smiley opens a Unicode emoji picker. A custom emoji this instance publishes is written by its shortcode, :name:, and renders here and on other servers.
  • Send it later. The clock button turns Post into Schedule: pick a time at least five minutes from now and the post waits on the server until then. What is waiting is listed under Settings → Scheduled posts, where one can be cancelled; to move a post to another time, cancel it and write it again.
  • Replying and quoting. Reply under a post opens the composer addressed to its author; Quote in a post's menu embeds it in yours. Only public and unlisted posts held by this server can be quoted, and the quoted author receives the post that carries their words.

Your own posts carry more in their … menu: Edit (saved and sent to the servers that have the post as an update), Delete (removed here, and a deletion is sent to every server that received it — this cannot be undone), Pin to profile (up to five public or unlisted posts), and Delivery status, which says which servers received the post, which are still being tried and which gave up.

Putting a post away

A post you no longer want on your profile does not have to be deleted. Archive, in the post's own … menu, takes it off your profile and out of every timeline, search and hashtag page on this server, and leaves it exactly where it is otherwise: nobody is told, nothing is sent anywhere, and you can put it back at any time from Settings → Archived posts.

What archiving is not is a way to take a post back from the fediverse. Other servers that received it still have it, and somebody who kept the link still opens it — that is what Delete is for, and deleting cannot be undone.

If your post is kept back

Your server may show some posts to a moderator before they go out. There are two reasons it does: the first post of an account that has not published anything here yet, and a post that tripped one of the server's spam rules — a lot of links, or a lot of mentions from an account nobody follows yet. Your administrator can turn either off, and neither applies to a direct message: nobody reads those but the people you wrote to. If you are an administrator of this server, nothing of yours is ever held — you are the person the queue is waiting for.

When it happens the app says so at once, and your writing is kept — there is no need to write it again, and writing it again only finds the copy already waiting. Nobody but you and the moderators can see it in the meantime: it is in no timeline, not even your own. Settings → Waiting to be looked at is where yours are, and you can take one back from there, which deletes it and tells nobody.

If it is approved, it goes out as an ordinary post, dated the moment it was approved rather than when you wrote it. If it is refused, it is deleted and you are told.

Where it was taken

The pin in the composer's toolbar says where a post was taken. It offers the places people on this server have already posted from as you type; a name nobody here has used yet becomes a place the moment your post goes out, with a country if you add one. Nothing is looked up on a map service — the app never sends your location anywhere to work out what it is, which is the same promise it keeps by stripping the camera's location from your pictures. The place shows as a small marker under the post, and tapping it opens the page of everything public that was taken there. Release the pin and the post has no place.

Reading

The sidebar is the map:

  • My Feed, Local, Global — a switcher above the posts. My Feed is what the people and hashtags you follow post; Local is every public post written on this Nextcloud; Global is every public post this server has received. Photos and Videos carry the same switcher over posts that are pictures, or videos — including videos from PeerTube channels anyone here follows.
  • News — the same three scopes again, over what people are reading: posts that link to an article, and posts that are one (blogs on Plume, WriteFreely, Ghost or WordPress publish them, and they arrive here whole). A list rather than a grid, each row led by the headline and the source the page gave. A mention or a hashtag is a link too and neither puts a post here, so this stays news rather than becoming your feed again.
  • Activities — your notifications: mentions, favourites, boosts, new followers and follow requests, poll results, edits of posts you boosted. The sidebar badge counts what arrived since you last looked, and the same events reach the Nextcloud bell and its mail digest; a follow request can be accepted or declined from the bell itself. The page says how many that is at the top — 3 new activities, with a Mark all as read button that clears the badge whichever filter you are looking at — and marks the activities themselves: each new one carries a New tag beside its timestamp, and a New heading separates them from Earlier where the page holds both. Otherwise the page marks itself read after a couple of seconds in front of you, and that position is the one every other Fediverse client shares: a badge cleared on your phone is cleared here too.
  • Direct messages — the posts addressed to you and nobody else, with the composer already set to direct.
  • Explore — one collapsible entry holding everything there is to look at besides your own feed: the hashtags you follow, your lists, and the tags this server is busy with right now, in that order. Each list is a timeline of its own; every Nextcloud group you belong to (up to 500 members) is a list automatically, kept in step with the group, and your own are made in Settings → Lists. Explore shows as much as the sidebar has room for and no more — make the window taller and more appears. What you follow is never pushed out by what happens to be trending: the trending tags take only the room the rest leave, and a tag you already follow is not offered twice.
  • Liked posts and Bookmarks — what you favourited, and what you saved with Bookmark in a post's menu. Bookmarks are private and never leave this server.
  • Statistics — what you have posted here and what came back: likes, boosts and replies per post, your best posts, when your posts do best, and which of your hashtags work.

Open a post (its timestamp, o or Enter) for its own page: the thread, a reply box, who boosted and favourited it, and the details a card leaves out — exact time, audience, language, whether it was edited, and a link to the original on its home server. Like, Boost and Reply sit under every post; a post's … menu adds Bookmark, Open on original instance and Report.

A post that links somewhere gets a preview card, read by this server rather than by your browser. With the notify_push app installed, new posts arrive live; without it the page checks every 30 seconds.

Announcements from your administrators

When the administrators of this Nextcloud post a notice — a maintenance window, a move, a new rule — it appears at the top of the timeline, above the composer, on every page except a single post's own. It is there because you have not read it yet.

Got it marks it read. It does not disappear under you: it stays where it was, greyed, with a Read mark, so you can finish the sentence you were on. It is gone the next time you open the app, and gone on your phone too — being read is remembered by the server for your account, not by this browser.

Announcements you have already read are not shown. While the card is up — that is, while something in it is still unread — a line at its foot, Show 2 announcements you have read, brings them back; once everything is read the card is gone entirely and so are they. An announcement with an end says when it runs out ("Until 21 September"), and one that has not started yet, or has run out, is never shown at all.

The emoji buttons under an announcement are the one thing you can say back to one. Press one to add yours or to take it back, or press the smiley with a plus on it to choose another; you may put up to eight different emoji on the same announcement.

Administrators post and remove announcements in Administration → Social.

Stories

Above your own feed is a row of faces: whose stories are up. A story is one picture or video that the people who follow the account can see for a day, and then it is gone. A face with a coloured ring around it still holds something you have not seen; tap it and the stories play one after another, each for the seconds its poster gave it, and the ring goes grey. Hold the picture to pause it, tap the left or right of it to go back or forward, and use the arrows at the sides to move to the next account.

Your own place is always first in the row, with a + on it. It opens a small dialog: choose a picture or a video, add a caption if you like, and say how many seconds a picture should show for. The picture goes up the way every attachment does — stripped of the camera's metadata — and your story is up for a day, to your followers and nobody else. While it is up, you can see how many people watched it and take it down early from the same player.

Somebody watching a story can answer it: a row of emoji under the picture for a reaction, and a box beside them for a line of text. Either one goes to the person who posted it and to nobody else — a reply to a story is a message, not a comment on a page — and only somebody who follows them can send one, which is the same condition as being able to see the story at all. Five answers to one story is the limit, because without one what a story hands somebody is a private channel to its poster that the poster cannot close. What was said shows under your own story while it is up, and goes with it when it expires: a reply is not a post, and nothing keeps it after the thing it was about has gone.

Stories travel. Yours go to the people who follow you on other servers that have stories — Pixelfed is the one that does. Stories from a Pixelfed account do not come the other way, and that is Pixelfed's decision rather than this server's: it sends them only to servers it recognises as Pixelfed. Taking yours down early takes it down there too. What another server does with its copy after the day is up is that server's business, which is why a story that arrives here is kept for a day at the most, whatever the sender says, and one that has already expired is not kept at all. Watching a story from another server sends a receipt to its author so that their own server can count it, and reactions and replies travel the same way in both directions, in the shape Pixelfed's own inbox reads.

Collections

A profile has a Collections tab beside Posts, Photos, Videos and Tagged: the account's albums. Each is a page of the posts the owner gathered into it, drawn as the same grid of squares the Photos tab uses, with a lock on the ones that are for followers only.

Your own shelf has a New collection field at the top. To put a post into one, open the post's menu (…) and choose Add to a collection; only your own posts with a picture or a video in them offer it, because that is all a collection may hold. On a collection's page you can Edit its title, description and audience, Remove posts from their own squares, or Delete it — the posts stay where they are.

Posting as a team

If an administrator has given one of your Nextcloud groups an account, a small picker appears in the composer beside the language and the audience: As myself, or the team. Choose the team and the post goes out from the team's account — its name, its picture, its followers — rather than from yours.

Everybody in the group can post as it, and the list is checked at the moment you press post: leaving the group takes the account away with it, with nothing to remember to undo.

Who actually wrote each post is recorded. The team can see it, and so can a moderator looking at a report; nobody else can. Outside the team, the team speaks with one voice, which is the point of having a team account.

An administrator makes one with occ social:team <group> <username>.

A page of your work

Settings → Portfolio makes a page with its own address, to put on a CV. A profile is a feed: everything you posted, newest first, with the follow button and the boosts and the replies around it. A portfolio is the opposite — a title, a sentence, the pictures you chose, and nothing else on it.

Give it a title and a line about the work, choose a grid of squares or one picture at a time, and say where the pictures come from: your most recent public photos, or one of your collections. Then decide what goes under each one — the caption, where it was taken, the year — and whether your own picture is at the top.

Until you turn Publish my portfolio on, the page is a draft only you can see. Once it is on, the address appears under the switch and anybody with it can read the page without signing in, which is the whole point. Only your public photos are ever on it, whatever the rest of the settings say: the page is built by asking for your posts as an anonymous reader, so a followers-only photograph cannot reach it. The draft shows you exactly what will be published, which is why a followers-only photo is missing from it too.

Who is in the photo

Open one of your own posts with a picture in it, choose Tag people from its menu (…), and type the handles of the people in it, separated by commas. Their names appear under the post, linked to their profiles, and each of them is told — including somebody on another server, because the name is written onto the post as a mention and the post is sent out again.

The field holds the whole list rather than only what you are adding, so taking somebody out of the photo is deleting their handle. Only the person who posted a photo can name anybody in it: if anybody could, writing your own name onto somebody else's picture would put their post in front of an audience that never asked for it.

Naming somebody does not change who may see the post. A followers-only photograph stays followers-only.

Each profile has a Tagged tab: the photographs that account is named in, whoever took them. If you are named in one and would rather not be, Remove me under the post takes your name off, and needs nobody's permission.

Notifications your settings held back

Settings → Blocking, under Filtered notifications. Your notification settings can hold some notifications back rather than show them — from accounts nobody here follows, from brand-new accounts, from people you do not follow. They wait in that card, one row per sender with how many they have sent and the first words of their most recent post.

You decide about the person, not about each notification: Show these settles everything that account has sent and will send, and Dismiss stops you being asked about them again while leaving what they sent hidden. There are buttons for the whole list too. Until this page existed the setting held things back with nowhere to see them, which is worse than not having the setting.

Hiding a whole server

Settings → Blocking now has a third list: the servers you have hidden. Hiding one hides every account on it and everything they post, and takes your follows in both directions with it. It is the answer to being bothered by a server rather than by one person — the alternative was blocking accounts one at a time as they appeared.

What a post used to say

A post that has been edited says so under it. That line is a button now: it opens every version, oldest first, with the content warning and the pictures each one carried. A reader who has been quoted or replied to can see what changed rather than being told only that something did.

Filtering out words

Some words are not worth reading. Blocking → Filtered words is where you say so — with the accounts you have blocked and muted and the servers you have hidden, because it is the same decision aimed at a word rather than at a person. It is the same list a Mastodon app on your phone writes to: a filter you made there has been applying here all along, and this is the first page that shows it.

A filter is four things:

  • A name. Whatever reminds you later what it was for.

  • The words. One or more; a post matches if any of them appears in its text, its content warning, the description of one of its pictures, or an option of a poll. Upper and lower case never matter, and a boost is read as the post it boosts, so nothing escapes a filter by being boosted. Each word can be marked whole word only, which is the difference between filtering "cat" and also filtering every "catalogue".

  • Where it applies. My Feed, Activities (your notifications), the Local, Global and hashtag timelines, Conversations (the replies above and below an opened post), and Profiles. Somewhere you did not tick, a matching post arrives as usual. Ticking nothing is refused: a filter with no place applies nowhere. Two exceptions worth knowing: list timelines are never filtered, even with My Feed ticked, and in Activities only taking a post out has an effect — a notification is never folded.

  • What happens to a matching post. Either it is folded away — the post keeps its place in the timeline, with the name of the filter where its text would be and a Show anyway button; nothing of the post is on the page until you press it, so the words you filtered cannot be read on the way past. In the Photos and Videos grids the same post shows a covered tile with no picture. Or it is taken out of the timeline, and never reaches this app at all. Either way nothing is deleted and nobody is told; lift the filter and the post is back as it was.

    A post that carries a content warning of its own is still warned about after you press Show anyway: the author's cover is not yours to lift.

A filter can also be given an expiry — thirty minutes up to a week — after which it simply stops applying. It stays in the list, marked Expired, and saving it again starts it over. Editing a filter that is still counting down leaves its expiry alone unless you change it.

Because a filter that removes posts is easy to forget and looks exactly like a conversation with a hole in it, the page says at the top which of your filters are taking posts away right now, and where.

Filters are private: they are never sent to another server, and they change nothing for anybody else reading the same post.

Managing your account

Pronouns and a support link. Two of the four profile fields on Edit profile have boxes of their own, because this app draws them differently: the pronouns appear beside your name rather than in the table at the bottom, and a support address (https://…) becomes a button on your profile. They are still ordinary profile fields underneath, so Mastodon and the rest show them in their table as they always did — and if you already wrote a row called "Pronouns" by hand, it is picked up as one.

  • Profile. My profile (behind your portrait at the bottom of the sidebar) → Edit profile: a banner (upload one or give the address of one), a bio, and up to four name/value fields shown under it — your website, your pronouns, where you work. All of it is shared with other servers. A fifth field is dropped by the server without saying so, so the editor stops at four, and a row with only one half filled in is dropped the same way; emptying the table and saving removes it from your profile everywhere.

  • Verified links. A field whose value is a full web address — written out, starting with http:// or https:// — can carry a verified tick, and the editor shows where each of yours stands: verified and when it was proved, not verified yet, or, for a bare example.org, that nothing written that way can be verified at all.

    To earn one, put a link back to your profile on that page: <a rel="me" href="https://your-server/@you">…</a> anywhere in its HTML, or <link rel="me" href="…"> in its <head>. me only has to be one of the rel words, and a trailing slash or a #fragment on the address makes no difference. The editor shows the exact line to paste, with a copy button, as soon as a value looks like an address.

    This server fetches the page itself, in the background, at most once a day per account and only over http or https, and marks the field when it finds the link back. A page it cannot reach is left unverified and asked again later; a page that stops linking back loses the tick. Editing a field's value drops that field's tick straight away — the tick belongs to the address, not to the row — and it returns once the page at the new address has been checked. Your other fields keep theirs.

  • Featured hashtags. Settings → Featured hashtags decides which tags sit under your bio — up to ten, and anybody reading your profile can click one to see what you posted under it. It opens with the hashtags you post with most and have not featured yet, so you pick from your own writing rather than guessing; anything else goes in the box beside them, with or without the #. The × on a row stops featuring that tag and does nothing else — your posts keep their hashtags. Your own profile links here from where the tags are shown, whether you feature any or not.

  • Blocking and muting. Both are in the menu on an account's profile. Block severs the relationship in both directions, hides the account everywhere, and tells the other server (unless the administrator turned that off). Mute hides the account from your timelines and notifications without it ever knowing. Blocking, under Settings in the sidebar, lists both with unblock and unmute inline.

  • Follow requests. When your account is locked, people asking to follow you appear under Follow requests in the sidebar — Accept or Reject — and on the Nextcloud bell. Locking the account itself is the Approve who follows you switch under Settings → Your account, which is locked on PATCH /api/v1/accounts/update_credentials underneath.

  • Reporting. Report in a post's menu sends the post, with an optional note, to the moderators of this instance. From the web client it is never sent to the reported account or their server.

  • Your year. GET /api/v1/annual_reports serves what Mastodon calls #Wrapstodon: one report per year you wrote anything in, with twelve months of what you posted and who arrived, the hashtags you used most, your three posts that travelled furthest, and a word for how you use the account. It is worked out from the posts already here whenever it is asked for, so there is nothing to wait for and nothing to go stale. The web client has no page for it yet; a phone client that has the feature shows it.

  • Who may quote your post. A post's menu has Quotes of this post on your own posts. The top half is who may quote it from now on — anybody, the people who follow you, or nobody but you — and the bottom half is who already has, with a button that detaches one. The two are separate on purpose: changing the setting does not take back a quote somebody has already posted and other people have read. Detaching tells the other server, which then shows the quote as withdrawn; the post itself is theirs and stays where it is.

  • Authorized apps. Settings → Authorized apps lists every app you have signed in to with this account — a phone client, a cross-poster, anything that asked — with what it may do, when you granted it and when it was last used. Sign this app out takes the key back, and the app asks you to sign in again the next time you open it. It is the page to open after losing a phone, and the only page where signing an app out does not depend on still having the app.

  • Export and migration. Settings → Migration has three sections. Export downloads a zip of your profile, follows, followers, blocks, mutes, bookmarks, likes and every post you wrote — your private key is deliberately not in it. Import reads such an archive (or a Nextcloud account export) back in without deleting anything; posts in it are listed, not published again. The third section imports the follows from another network's export — a following_accounts.csv, or Pixelfed's pixelfed-following.json.

  • One list at a time, out. Under the Export button, Or one list at a time downloads your follows, your followers, your blocks, your mutes or your lists as a single CSV, each written the way Mastodon writes it. It is the same content as the files inside the zip, for when the other end wants one file rather than an archive. The followers file is a record rather than something an import can re-create: a follower follows you again, or their server is told by the move.

  • Blocks, mutes and lists, in. Bring your blocks, mutes and lists reads the other three files from the same export. Blocks and mutes are decisions your account makes on its own, so they apply as soon as the file is read — and a block federates, exactly as blocking somebody from here does. Do the follows first and the lists after: a list here can only hold accounts you follow, as on Mastodon, so anybody you have not followed again yet is counted as skipped rather than followed by a button that says lists. A list you already have is filled rather than made a second time, and a list that follows a Nextcloud group is left alone — its members are the group's.

  • Naming your old account. Your old server will not send your followers here until this account says it is also you. Settings → Migration → Accounts you also answer to is where you say it: paste the old account's own address (https://pixelfed.social/users/you, not the handle) and press Add. Nothing is sent to anybody — it is a note this server keeps about an account it owns — and you can take it off again whenever you like. Moving the followers themselves is the half that cannot be undone, and stays with an administrator (occ social:account:move on the old server).

  • Bringing your posts. The fourth section of Settings → Migration reads the export from your old server — this app's own archive, Mastodon's or GoToSocial's outbox.json, or Pixelfed's pixelfed-statuses.json — and writes the posts in it here as yours, dated when you wrote them, with their pictures. Nothing is sent to anybody: none of it is published again, so the people who follow you do not receive years of posts in one afternoon. Boosts and direct messages are left out, and a reply keeps the post it answers when the file holds both. A picture the export names only by its address is fetched from the old server, which has to still be running; the switch above the button turns that off. At most 2000 posts a run — upload the same file again to carry on — and an archive too large for a browser can be imported by an administrator with occ social:account:import-posts.

  • Coming from Instagram. The same button reads an Instagram archive. Ask Instagram to download your information and choose JSON: the HTML download is a set of web pages with the posts taken out, and this says so rather than failing quietly. Your posts and reels arrive with their pictures, their captions and the hashtags you wrote in them. Two things are worth knowing before you press it. An Instagram post does not record who could see it, so every one of them is posted here with your own default visibility — set that first, in Settings → Your account, if you would rather they were not public. And your stories, your archived posts and anything you deleted are not imported: you put those away on purpose.

  • Leaving. Settings → Delete your Social account deletes your fediverse account and keeps your Nextcloud one. Everything you posted goes, your followers and the people you follow are let go, and every server that knew the account is told it is gone — a post already on somebody else's server is deleted by asking that server to delete it, which almost all of them do and none of them can be made to. You are asked to type your handle first, because it cannot be undone; take an archive from Settings → Migration → Export first if you might want one. Afterwards you are back at the setup screen and can make a new account straight away, under a different handle: the old one is held for an hour so that nobody can take it the moment you let it go. Deleting the Nextcloud user does the same thing to the Social account along the way.

Keyboard shortcuts

Press ? anywhere, or open Settings → Keyboard shortcuts, for the list. Shortcuts are off while you are typing in a field or the composer, and while a modifier key is held.

Key Does
j Next post
k Previous post
l or f Like the post in focus
b Boost the post in focus
r Reply to the post in focus
o or Enter Open the post in focus
n Write a new post
g Go to the home timeline
? Show these shortcuts

Enter on a focused button or link still presses it — the shortcut only applies where nothing else claims the key.

What the web client does not do yet

Third-party Mastodon clients cannot connect to this server yet, because the API is served under the app's own path rather than at the domain root (see Mastodon-Compatibility.md); until that changes, the web client is the client. There is no post translation — ActionService's translate hands the post back unchanged — and no streaming API, so the page polls.