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.
- Getting an account
- Finding and following people
- Writing a post
- Reading
- Filtering out words
- Managing your account
- Keyboard shortcuts
- What the web client does not do yet
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.
- 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 five 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, and Hashtags that are trending, ranked over a window you pick.
- 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 (
#tagin 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. Upload it in the first-run introduction or under Settings → Migration and each account is followed again from here.
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.
- 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.
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.
- 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.
- Direct messages — the posts addressed to you and nobody else, with the composer already set to direct.
- Lists — each list you have 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. Your own lists are made in Settings → Lists, which is also where one is renamed, deleted, or has somebody added to or taken out of it; the sidebar shows them all.
- 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.
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.
Some words are not worth reading. Settings → Filtered words is where you say so, and 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.
-
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://orhttps://— 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 bareexample.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>.meonly has to be one of therelwords, and a trailing slash or a#fragmenton 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. Blocked and muted accounts, 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
lockedonPATCH /api/v1/accounts/update_credentialsunderneath. -
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.
-
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
following_accounts.csv, and explains that moving your followers here is a one-way move that an administrator performs withocc social:account:aliasandocc social:account:move. -
Leaving. Deleting the Nextcloud user deletes the Social account with it: what you posted is dropped and a deletion is sent to the servers that saw it.
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.
These exist in the server and are reachable through the Mastodon-compatible
API, but the web client has no page for them: collections, stories and
places — each has a controller in lib/Controller/ and nothing in the
sidebar, the router or Settings. 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.