Everything Else You Need To Know About Minds
This blog covers the rest of things I hadn't previously covered and allows me to clean up The Absolutely Epic Guide For Learning To Use Minds and make it easier to navigate by putting all that information here.
Profile Setup
Setting up your profile is fairly easy and similar to Twitter. Your profile and banner will be highlighted with gray and display text. You can click on each of them to browse for an image and add it. You can also add multiple banners as your cover and create a slideshow
For your bio/about section, you can write it pretty much as long as you want and it may not be a terrible idea since people could read whatever is on there as they scroll through your newsfeed.
Below the about section is your location which doesn't matter as it's not linked to anything as far as we know for now. You can add as many links as you want which is nice and then hashtags are key. You can only pick 5 hashtags of which will determine where you'll show up when people search channels. For instance last time I checked I was 5th in #crypto and #blockchain as they are both listed in my profile. I helps usually to focus on 2 niches and 3 more broad categories, but most importantly that they are the 5 hashtags that describe your content the most accurately because you want attract the right audience and you only have 5 keywords to do so when it comes to searches in "top".
Rewards are below the bio where you can setup rewards for your subscribers or whomever to donate for. It works the way Subscribestar or Patreon does with multiple tiers that you unlock and you can see how mine work. There is official way to honor these, you just assume good faith and obviously the creators shouldn't want to discourage donations so it usually works out fine for everyone. I haven't heard of any major issues yet.
Posting
First we talk about basic newsfeed posts.
A lot of this is similar to way blogs posts are published so you can refer to that blog and or vlog below, but I will still go through it here.
Explicit
If your content is NSFW be sure to mark it explicit by clicking the E in the black box otherwise you will have a lot of upset viewers who will likely block you to avoid more mishaps especially if they are in fact at work.
Attachments
You can post and share images and videos, however videos are limited to 15 minutes for now, so depending on duration you may be better off sharing a YouTube link so that it will be embedded and people can watch your full video. However I recommend embedding YouTube videos to blogs instead as I have seen much greater success doing this and I see other creators like Sargon of Akkad doing the same.
Public
This option refers to your reward tiers which I explain below, but essentially it just let you make posts premium so that followers have to donate a certain amount to see the post which we will also look cover in settings below.
Hashtags
You can only use 5 hashtags so make sure you try make them as relevant as possible to the subjects you are talking about. I usually try to use 3 broader hashtags and 2 more specific hashtags, but there really is no perfect formula. Try out different things!
Tagging
You can tag people in posts and comments, but just be aware that you can only do 5 tags per post or comment in total. After the first 5, the rest will not receive a notification for a tag even though they will still be hotlinked via their username that you post.
Early Updates (Canary)
To gain access the early updates of Minds and experimental projects go to the dropdown menu from your avatar head and choose "Canary"
Then you just turn it on where the button says "TURN OFF" below the subtitle
As you can see right now their projects are redoing the help desk and adding "suggested users" for us to test out. Interesting. I mean I follow them all already, but it is accurate to my preferences.
Settings
One thing to note is that at the bottom of the page in settings you can see when your account was created which I thought was kind of cool to know.
You will end up in the general section with what you'd expect like changing your display name, password, set explicit and language filters, and then finally you can close any open sessions you are logged in with. Below that is email notifications which explain itself: you can set what email notifications you want. How about none. Wire I talk about in the token tutorial below. Disable or delete channel is also self explanatory.
Suggested Hashtags
In settings, you will see "suggested hashtags" where you can then set all your preferences for what you'd like to see in terms of posts and channels.
You can also make changes to this at the top of post sections
TwoFA
Setup 2 factor authentication for more account security.
Notifications
You have multiple sections here the for notifications. The first is all of your notifications, then mentions of you, then comments, groups, upvotes and downvotes, and lastly reminds. This can help you can find the right notifications once you start to get more engagement or join more conversations.
Group Side bar Group And Creating A Group
The groups you end up joining exist in a nice sidebar for you to access easily.
Click the group section to navigate there.
You will see all the groups here and if you want to create a group go to the "Start A New Group"
Below you'll find all the similar things you would fill out when creating your profile except here you can set a few group specific settings. Open groups allow anyone to join whereas closed groups accept members and then you can allow anyone to post or set approvals. You may also set whether or not the default feed is the newsfeed or the group chat.
Searching
When you search a keyword you can look based on many filters you see below and you will get a glimpse of each. It's pretty straightforward and they are always improving its accuracy. You can switch between top or latest and after that it's based on post type, then channel or group.
Encrypted Messenger
The encrypted messenger promises to provide you ultimate security and even requires a second password to keep your messages safe. Blue bubbles mean someone is online and green means you have an unread message from them.
Minds Plus
Minds plus is a bonus to improve your feed by removing boosts, it will give you access to exclusive content that of which I am unaware of, give a nice badge that shows you donated, and finally the most important part: verification.
Interestingly enough it's challenging to find this opt-in landing page for Minds plus at https://www.minds.com/plus
Most of those are self explanatory and it costs 20 tokens a month so decide whether or not that's worth it for you.
Minds Verification
Once you have Minds plus, you can verify your account and then even if you cancel your Minds plus subscription you will stay verified. So it kind of acts as a barrier of 20 tokens so people aren't all submitting for verification given you can do it fairly easily. If you are only doing this once just make sure you don't have the default "repeat this transaction monthly" option.
Minds describes the process pretty simply as
Submit a request and post your Minds channel link on at least two other social sites so we know that it is you. The Minds team will review the submission and verify that you actually are who you claim to be. This helps our community confirm that you are the real channel and not an imposter.
They got back to me fairly quickly and I was impressed.
The badge then shows up below your subscribers and views on your profile and beside your name on posts and comments.
Rate Limits
This is a great image that outlines the current rate limits. Minds discusses this as well in their blog on Announcing Hashtags 2.0 and Rate Limits
You will be given a restriction based on the limit you break. If you break the limit within 5 minutes, you will be restricted for 5 minutes. If you break it for a 24 hour period, you will be restricted for 24 hours.
Currently restrictions completely prevent you from doing the activity that was rate limited.
This is highlighted in The Absolutely Epic Guide For Learning To Use Minds which has every resource and tutorial you need.
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