If you’re a heavy user of Twitter you may have noticed that the popular social network is centrally controlled, really huge & in a sense, tends to monopolize your communications. Many users also about what would happen if it gets sold, as it seems to be up for sale at the moment. It’s the same story for almost all the major commercial social platforms. The risk of abuse is something that Mastodon seeks to address with its platform, one that can be hosted by anyone freely & can be federated with other independent Mastodon instances.
Mastodon is an alternative to Twitter, and also to the GNU, & the Free Software Foundation’s social project, which seeks to promote & create open-source software for both public & private communications, providing non-commercial alternatives to popular social network & communications platforms like Twitter & Facebook. It also promotes the creation & maintenance of instances of these platforms so that users can avoid using commercial options.
Mastodon, as a decentralized & federated micro-blogging engine, seeks to take Twitter on directly & can even be run as a closed instance to which only specific company members or closed groups have access (i.e. you don’t have to be federated if you don’t want to). The focus of the project is on having a useful user interface & a clean REST API, having Ruby on Rails on its back-end & Redux & React.js on the front-end.
Its main features are:
- Free & open-source.
- Decentralized – no worries about a single company controlling your communications.
- Fully interoperable with GNU social & any OStatus platform
- Real time timeline updates
- Allows media attachments
- OAuth2 & a straightforward REST API
- Background processing for long-running tasks
- Deployable via Docker
Besides Twitter & GNU Social, there are a number of other projects that have some similarities to Mastodon, though in some cases they contain other features more akin to Facebook or Google+, & have had various levels of success: Discourse, Diaspora, Forem, Mailboxer, Thredded, Social Shares… The person responsible for development is Germany-based ‘Eugen’ (@Gargron on GitHub).
Source code is available here & if you want to sign up for a public instance of Mastodon you can go here.
– This post is merely a startup profile based on publicly available information & not a review. -
Image Credit: Mastodon
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