Mastodon is a self-hosted social networking service. It allows anyone to host their own server node in the network, and its various separately operated user bases are federated across many different servers. These nodes are referred to as “instances” by Mastodon users.
These servers are connected as a federated social network, allowing users from different servers to interact with each other seamlessly. Mastodon is a part of the wider Fediverse, allowing its users to also interact with users on different open platforms that support the same protocol, such as Pleroma, Pixelfed, PeerTube and Friendica.
Publish anything you want: links, pictures, text, video.
Mastodon is free and open source software.
Features include:
- Communicates using the ActivityPub standard. This allows a Mastodon users communicate with users on other servers that support ActivityPub.
- Federation – a form of decentralization. Instead of a single central service that all people use, there are multiple services, that any number of people can use.
- Privacy features with effective anti-abuse tools to help protect yourself.
- Aggregates messages in local and federated timelines in real-time.
- Audio player with custom thumbnails.
- Good moderation tools.
Website: joinmastodon.org
Support: Documentation, GitHub Code Repository
Developer: Eugen Rochko and others
License: GNU Affero General Public License v3.0
Mastodon is written in Ruby and JavaScript. Learn Ruby with our recommended free books and free tutorials. Learn JavaScript with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
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