(If you want to block or mute individual accounts, please see the Blocking and Muting Accounts on Mastodon guide.)

Ordinary individual users do not have any means to block entire servers on Mastodon. The only people who can block servers are the server admins, through a process called defederation.

But what about the “block domain” option? Doesn’t that block servers?

If a user goes to a profile or post and clicks on the ⋯ button, this does bring up an option called “Block domain” which sounds like it would block a server. However, this option just mutes the server, it hides the server’s posts from you but does not hide your posts from the server.

So, if I’m concerned about a particular server, how do I block it?

If you’re an ordinary user, you have two options if you want to cut off communications with a specific server:

• Talk to your server’s admin and convince them to defederate the server you are concerned about.

OR

• Move your account to another server that has defederated that server.

If I move to another server, how do I find out if it blocks the server I’m worried about?

To see a server’s defederation list:

1. Go to its website and click Learn More or ⋯, which takes you to its info page.
2. Scroll down the info page until you get to the section marked Moderated Servers, and click this to open it.
3. Scroll down the list until you get to the server you’re worried about. If it says “suspended” next to its name, that means the server has been defederated.

Note that for safety reasons some servers hide their defederation list, or obfuscate the names. If you are unable to see the defederation list, try messaging the server’s admin to ask if they have defederated the server you’re worried about.

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BookWyrm has a built-in catalogue of books, which is based on open data from WikiData ⧉ in collaboration with Inventaire ⧉. This data is collaboratively written by volunteers, just like Wikipedia, so it is huge but does also have gaps.

If you can’t find the book you want, you can manually add it to BookWyrm by doing the following:

1. Log in on your BookWyrm server and search for the book you want in the search box at the top of the screen.
2. If you can’t find your book in the results, click the link at the bottom of the screen to include results from catalogues on other BookWyrm servers. This will give you even more search results.
3. If you still can’t find your book, click on the Manually add book link at the bottom of the screen below the second set of search results.

Why is it so awkward? Why do I have to search first?

The idea of this setup is to discourage people from manually entering the details of books that are already in the catalogue. Duplicates cause headaches for other people trying to choose particular books, because they don’t know which one of the duplicates to select. By reducing the number of duplicates, the catalogue is kept easier to use.

Can I import book lists into BookWyrm from other sources?

Yes, if you have an existing account on Goodreads, LibraryThing, StoryGraph, OpenLibrary or Calibre you can import your book lists into BookWyrm.

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