Mastodon

Project info

Project site

Mastodon

Creator

Gargron

Maintainers

Mastodon gGmbH

Status

active

Mastodon is a federated social network, with a Twitter-like UI.

Features

• Content feeds: home (posts from accounts you follow), local (public posts from accounts on the same instance), and federated (public posts from connected servers)
• Character limit: 500, which is much longer than Twitter fwiw
• Customizable web UI
• Various available clients on all platforms
• Instance custom emojis
• Moderation
  • Instance admins are capable of blocking contents from other servers on different levels
  • Normal members are capable of mute and block other users or instances, and filter words
• Accounts can be exported and migrated to another server (posts are not migrated, however)

Forks

Mastodon has a few forks, the most two popular ones are Mastodon Glitch Edition and hometown, which provides some extra features.

Personal opinions

Overall, Mastodon gives a nice and intuitive user interface. It also provides quite flexible tools for moderating your timeline. However, this can be abused by some instance admins who would block other instances without specific reason, which pretty much defeats the purpose of federation.

Mastodon doesn’t support markups (the glitch-soc fork does, afaik). This can be limiting if you like embedding links into the text. For this reason, I prefer Pleroma.

See also

• Guides:
  • Kev’s guide
  • joyeusenoelle’s guide
  • Göktuǧ’s tips on federated social networks
• Mastodon instance lists:
  • joinmastodon.org endorsed list
  • instances.noct.zone
• Other microblogging social networks:
  • Pleroma
  • Misskey

The development of project is active. You can help this project by contributing code, finding new issues, suggesting new features, or donation.