Mastodon

This article is a stub. You can help the IndieWeb wiki by expanding it.

Mastodon (formerly tootsuite) is an open source social network project that supports some IndieWeb building blocks like rel-me and (prior to version 4.0) microformats2, and has a federation of many instances, including https://indieweb.social/ for IndieWeb fans.

IndieWeb sites interact Mastodon instances directly & via Bridgy Fed. Mastodon is largest deployment of ActivityPub support and also has some compatibility with GNU social. As self-described in a 2021-09-29 tweet:

"Mastodon, your cryptocurrency-free decentralized social network. No blockchains, no NFTs, no attempting to turn every social interaction into a microtransaction"

• Homepage of the original instance
• GitHub

Features

(this section is a stub, please expand!)

Feature summary:

• profile - ability to create an account / profile with
  • photo
  • bio (with autolinked URLs)
  • h-feed
• posts
  • notes (default limit of 500 characters but some instances have raised this, sometimes considerably)
  • content warning to hide a note behind warning text, requiring a click to view
  • ...
• responses
  • mention
  • reply
  • favorite (star)
  • boost - repost
  • ...
• notifications

Specific feature details:

Profile

(stub)

Mastodon profiles show various information:

Mastodon’s h-feed support is better than their Atom support!

• following someone's mastodon microformats feed gives a much better result than their atom! - Aaron Parecki

E.g. screenshot when trying to follow:

And display of an item from a Mastodon h-feed:

Unfortunately, since version 4.0, Mastodon profiles and permalinks are now js;dr and no longer provide h-feed support.

Notifications

(stub)

Mastodon has a notifications page that shows various items such as when others react to your posts:

WebSub

The Atom feeds allow push notifications via WebSub, although this along with Atom support are considered legacy from its OStatus origins.

Federated Reply Interfaces

An interface for prompting the act of posting content from their preferred ActivityPub service of choice.

Link Previews

Mastodon displays link previews for posts, where it parses the usual OGP and Twitter Card data. In addition it has introduced its own meta data to enable crediting a post’s author with their Fediverse identity.

• fediverse:creator property with a Fediverse account ID, such as @[email protected], will be picked up and added to the link preview.
  • 2024-07-02 Eugen Rochko: Highlighting journalism on Mastodon (archived), the accouncement from Mastodo.
  • 2024-07-03 Matthias Ott: Highlighting Blogging on Mastodon (archived): refocus on all blogging.
  • The PR that brought this to Mastodon (archived): opened 2024-05-22, merged 2024-05-29. Includes some discussion on standadisation.
  • 2024-10-08 Robb Knight: Setting Up Mastodon Author Tags (archived), calls them “author tags” and describes how to enable them fully:

    you need to jump into your settings on Mastodon and go to the Author Attribution section under Public Profile > Verification. Add the domain(s) that you want to allow to be linked to your profile.

    • 2024-10-08 Eugen Rochko: Mastodon 4.3 (archived) is the official release bringing this to the masses.
  • Implementations (publishers)
    • WordPress ActivityPub plugin, since version 3.0.0
    • Open Graph plugin for WordPress, since 1.12.0
    • socialMeta plugin for Dotclear 2, since version 5.2
  • Implementations (consumers)
    • Mastodon
  • IndieWeb Examples
    • Matthias Ott
    • Add yourself here… (see this for more details)

IndieWeb Examples

IndieWeb folks using Mastodon accounts, in particular POSSEing from their IndieWeb site to Mastodon and/or backfeeding responses from Mastodon copies of posts back to their IndieWeb site.

If you’re directly interacting with Mastodon posts on other servers from your site, you should add your site instead to:

• If you’re using Bridgy Fed to federate your posts so people on Mastodon servers can follow you directly then add yourself to: IndieWeb Examples using Bridgy Fed
• If your server itself is directly interacting with Mastodon and other ActivityPub supporting services with Bridgy or another intermediary service, add yourself to: IndieWeb Examples supporting ActivityPub

Please copy the === Add yourself! === section and add yourself with permalinks to different/interesting examples and dates of when you first started interacting in those ways!

Add yourself!

Add yourself here… (see this for more details)

Other Examples

https://abhinavsarkar.net/microblog/ PESOS’s their Mastodon posts:

• https://fantastic.earth/@abnv/109527296195422044

  A reminder that you can pull your posts from your #Mastodon server using the RSS feed or the JSON API, and put them on your own website, like I did: https://abhinavsarkar.net/microblog/ #Indieweb

IndieWeb Support

Building Blocks

IndieWeb Building Blocks that Mastodon supports:

• h-card on comment markup in this patch
• full h-feed, h-entry, h-card on user profiles and post permalinks in this patch later fixed in this patch. See also #122
• rel-me is now support in this commit and that commit
• ...

rel-me support

Mastodon uses rel-me to support "verified" site links in a green box with a green checkmark next to the verified site.

https://joinmastodon.org/verification explains how the verification process works.

• Washington Post ran into an issue with verification because Mastodon had a 1MB limit on pages it requested while verifying. An update was submitted that looks at the first megabyte instead of limiting the page to 1MB. A public debugger tool was set up as well.
  • 2023-03-06 Chris Zubak-Skees: Here’s how The Washington Post verified its journalists on Mastodon (archived)

• Limitation with Twitter: https://mastodon.social/@Gargron/100749399047652462
  • "Link verification would work with Twitter profiles too since they have rel="me", but Twitter obfuscates links with t.co. I don't know how to deal with that, since resolving every href on the page to check for redirects doesn't seem viable." @Gargron September 18, 2018
• rel-me testimonial: https://mastodon.social/@qubyte/100749428077603231
  • "@Gargron Nice. I already had a rel=me link to mastodon in the header of my blog, so this was free!" @qubyte September 18, 2018
• rel-me for verified status advantage over Twitter: https://mastodon.social/@rickscully/100749623830777332
  • "@Gargron I added verified links. Thanks. Birdsite would never verify me despite owning my name domain and having been and active Internet user under my own name for decades." @rickscully September 19, 2018

IndieWeb Requests

To Be Proposed

These are ideas/suggestions for Mastodon to support more IndieWeb building blocks. Feel free to file individual issues for them in https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues and then move them (and their issue link) to the Requests section below.

• IndieAuth support (both sign-in with IndieAuth, and use of a Pleroma profile as an IndieAuth identity to sign-in elsewhere)
• WebSub support. Given Mastodon's h-feed support, WebSub support would be great for realtime notifications of updates from Mastodon profiles.
• ...

Requests

IndieAuth Provider

Requested informally or as an aside. No formal issue filed (yet).

Requested on Twitter: https://twitter.com/Lady_Ada_King/status/1062518206345097216 by
It would be really cool if you could use mastodon as an authentication provider for https://indieauth.com/"

Also: https://aaronparecki.com/2018/11/13/10/

Since Mastodon already supports OAuth 2, and all users already have a URL, adding IndieAuth to Mastodon would not be a huge leap.

It was also discussed in the following GitHub issue: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/4800

Micropub

If you can help add Micropub support to Mastodon, please contribute to:

• Mastodon issue #2234: Micropub Support

Micropub in Mastodon support has been requested for multiple reasons on:

• micro.blog: https://micro.blog/manton/1040840
  • "@[email protected] @[email protected] I think Micropub in Mastodon is a great idea! It's a simple API (especially for posting) with support from a lot of different tools now." @manton November 13, 2018
• an indieweb personal site: https://eddiehinkle.com/2018/11/13/20/reply/
  • "There are a bunch of great Micropub apps for the Web, iOS and Android so I definitely think it would be helpful to add Micropub support. "

Founder @Gargron noted Micropub support is “A lot simpler than ActivityPub C2S”:

• https://mastodon.social/users/Gargron/statuses/101059803950665324
  • "@trwnh Micropub is a lot simpler than ActivityPub C2S" @Gargron November 12, 2018

Rejected

Please consider rejections as opportunities to listen for feedback on how to improve indieweb building blocks, and always respond politely. It's a good thing when people spend their own time to analyze these requests and provide their reasons for rejection.

• 2018-04-03: Webmention sending support was surveyed (most were for it), but rejected (2018-04-03) for a set of privacy concerns that are worth addressing or at least having answers for. E.g. "It's a privacy violation that people aren't expecting", is no more true for sending Webmentions than sending referrer headers, or allowing search engine indexing — all of which could be gated on the same site/user preference.
• 2017-04-21: Subscribe to Atom feeds directly [1]
  • Update: "I do not plan on supporting Atom feeds that don't have Webfinger and Salmon (i.e. non-interactive, non-user feeds)"
• ...

If you want to re-request a rejected feature, please at a minimum:

• document the list of specific reasons for rejection of a feature
• somehow fix or address (via documentation etc.) the reasons for rejection, i.e. here on the wiki, or by updating the spec for the rejected feature.
• wait some amount of time before re-requesting. case-by-case judgment call. i.e. if you're able to quickly address all the problems noted, follow-up with a thank you for the feedback and link to where you have addressed the problems. otherwise consider waiting at least a few months, perhaps even a year before re-requesting. In either case, make it very clear what changes have occurred that make the feature request worthy of reconsideration.

Other Standards Support

Other standards and building blocks that Mastodon supports or depends on

Webfinger

Mastodon depends on Webfinger for various discovery use-cases.

• 2022-12-06 Mastodon instance with 6 files, describes the minimum six necessary files, starting with /webfinger?request=acct:user@domain, that a Mastodon instance will query your site at "domain" to do discovery for user profile information.

E.g. this non-Mastodon example demonstrates some of what Mastodon depends on:

• https://manton.org/.well-known/webfinger?resource=acct%[email protected] which redirects to:
• https://micro.blog/.well-known/webfinger?resource=acct%[email protected] which returns JSON

Note that ActivityPub itself has zero dependency on Webfinger, and thus it should be possible to support ActivityPub federation without Webfinger.

• to-do: inspect those six minimum files for which properties are truly essential, and which can be left out (without breaking Mastodon's consuming code flow), and come up with an alternative FYN discovery method to use instead, and propose as a fallback for Webfinger, so sites don't have to bother with supporting any explicit root level /.well-known paths.

Issues

Current

See Mastodon Github Issues:

• https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues

Resolved

Resolved or apparently resolved past issues.

• Official blog is no longer dependent on Medium and is built on Hugo instead. https://github.com/mastodon/blog

One Primary Instance

Resolution: Apparently resolved as there is a growing number of Mastodon instances (and the "primary" instances is now closed to new signups). See:

• https://instances.mastodon.xyz/
• https://github.com/tootsuite/documentation/blob/master/Using-Mastodon/List-of-Mastodon-instances.md

Issue:

One danger, that projects like Mastodon face, is when they are used as a service by more than one user, any downtime will affect multiple users. For instance, on the morning of Nov 11, 2016 the mastodon.social instance was down briefly and displayed a generic server error.

In this regard, promoting "mastodon.social" the site in particular as an alternative to Twitter (e.g. see tweets encouraging "join me on mastodon.social") merely encourage users to go from one silo, to a perhaps more open source-based and more open standards supporting silo, yet still dependent on another central org.

As a contrast, if each user were to run their own Mastodon instance, one instance going down would not affect multiple users in this fashion. Second best would be if users who choose not to run on their own servers were instead encouraged get together with someone that does, which again, would limit the exposure of when one instance goes down. But when such users all join a single server (e.g. the mastodon.social site itself) or any platform with similar architecture, they will suffer from this single point of failure in design.

On the other hand, multi-user instances benefit from shared community oversight, in the form of having admins and moderators who (presumably) actively block known-hostile instances and users.

Update (and one way to resolve this!) As of 2017-04-04 (or earlier?) mastodon.social is no longer accepting sign-ups and directing people to sign-up elsewhere: https://mastodon.social/about

"Due to exceptionally high traffic, registrations on this instance are closed until quality of service can be assured for existing users. Choose one of the various other public instances to sign up!"

POSSE

• Bridgy Publish supports POSSEing to Mastodon.
• Feed2Toot is a python command-line tool to POSSE any RSS Feed to Mastodon.
• Chris Aldrich uses the WordPress plugin Mastodon Autopost to POSSE posts from his site to Mastodon. (There is also a similar plugin called Mastodon Share that does roughly the same thing.) As of late 2019 he's getting backfeed from Mastodon posts via brid.gy.
• Chris Aldrich also uses Daniel Nix's Known plugin Known Mastodon to syndicate to Mastodon since April 2017.
• Greg McVerry uses the WordPress plugin Mastodon auto share to POSSE posts as toots. Replies to the toots are not syndicated back to the original post given the current misgiving Mastodon developers have towards webmentions.
• Greg McVerry also uses the activity stream plugin,host meta-data plugin, oStatus plugin, salmon plugin, and the webfinger plugin by  Matthias Pfefferle to create a fediverse instance of his own domain at [email protected]
• Neil Mather also uses the WordPress plugin Mastodon Autopost to POSSE posts from his site to Mastodon.
  • Added a syndication target to allow syndicating to Mastodon when posting via Micropub (https://github.com/ngm/doublepress/blob/master/functions.php#L593).
• All micro.blog hosted blogs or integrated feeds can POSSE to Mastodon by setting up cross-posting in their "Feeds & Cross-Posting" settings: https://micro.blog/account/feeds
• Ton Zijlstra uses Mastodon Autopost since August 2019.
• Calum Ryan uses the POSSE approach to publish short-form posts to Mastodon. They syndicate posts from their Kirby CMS interface with a custom-built hook function and checkbox field utilizing the mention-client-php to send Webmentions to brid.gy in the same method as used for publishing to Twitter.
• Nicolas Hoizey wrote Any Feed to Mastodon (GitHub Action) to POSSE to Mastodon from a JSON Feed
  • 2023-01-07 Nicolas Hoizey: Let's POSSE to Mastodon with a Feed and a GitHub Action (archived)
• Kelson Vibber uses IFTTT to automatically POSSE posts to Mastodon using Atom feeds and webhooks as described in How to Post to Mastodon From Anything Using IFTTT

Federating Directly with Mastodon

Some in the IndieWeb community are working on bridging the gap between the Fediverse and the IndieWeb efforts, some of these include Advanced plugins/extensions/software which shouldn't require a Mastodon account on an instance as they make your site behave like a standalone instance of Mastodon:

• Ryan Barrett has released Bridgy Fed which allows one to let their own website federate directly into Mastodon and other networks in various ways. Released in October 2017, it's still under development.
•  Matthias Pfefferle has a WordPress OStatus plugin which supports a variety of post kinds on Mastodon; it includes a handful of sub-plugins (Webfinger, Salmon, Activity Streams, etc.) to get everything working. Some of the pieces are out of date in October 2017, but are being upgraded over time.
  • Chris Aldrich is using  Matthias Pfefferle's ActivityPub plugin and NodeInfo plugin to make his WordPress website https://boffosocko.com to appear as an ActivityPub instance that can be followed on Mastodon at @[email protected]. Broad details for setting this up on WordPress can be found in the plugins or in this post: https://boffosocko.com/2022/04/25/55804148/#comment-374484
• Aaron Parecki implemented the bare minimum of the ActivityPub spec to be able to comment on Mastodon posts and receive comments, as well as to be able to be followed by Mastodon users. To follow Mastodon users, he follows their profile pages which contain Microformats markup. To receive comments, incoming "Inbox" notifications are discarded and are forwarded on via Webmention instead, which works since Mastodon permalinks contain good Microformats for parsing the reply.
• Lewis Dale has written a post on how they used Eleventy and Netlify to use their personal website as a Mastodon account: Be Friends with my Blog
• All micro.blog hosted blogs with a custom domain can set up a Mastodon-compatible ActivityPub feed in their account settings, so that Mastodon users can follow and interact with them: https://micro.blog/account

Tools

• https://instances.social/ This tool guides you through finding a Mastodon instance if you're not sure where to start.
• http://www.unmung.com/mastoview Mastoview tool for seeing content from random instance
• http://tooter.today This tool makes it easy to find a Mastodon instance if you're not sure where to start. (seems to not function as of 2018-04-08)
• discovery service for people and topics: https://fediverse.info/explore/people
• For potentially choosing an instance based on location, this map shows Mastodon servers that are are open for registration and serve specific regions or cities: https://umap.openstreetmap.fr/en/map/mastodon-near-me_828094#3/38.00/-88.95; To add your server, see repo at https://github.com/jazmichaelking/mastodon-near-me
• Simplified Federation: a Firefox browser extension that automates part of the process of following new accounts across instances.
• https://mastodonshare.com/ Allows you to use a generic share to Mastodon link where people can share to their mastodon instance.

Praise

• https://twitter.com/Discardia/status/1028466116715143168
  • "Letting go of what doesn’t give you what you want and upgrading are core principles of Discardia.
    
    There are many things I like about Twitter, but I find that all those things are available without the stuff I dislike on Mastodon.
    
    I’l keep a Twitter presence on both, for now." @Discardia August 12, 2018
• https://twitter.com/joinmastodon/status/1443418665471381509
  • "Mastodon, your cryptocurrency-free decentralized social network. No blockchains, no NFTs, no attempting to turn every social interaction into a microtransaction" @joinmastodon September 30, 2021
• reasons https://todon.nl/@Galdrakinn/101234887962339702
  • "Reasons to join mastodon:- No ‘influencers’- Chronological timeline- New mates- Accessibility features - CW etiquette - Without the pressure of trying to please an audience via an algorithm to go viral, your shit-posting skills blossom into beautiful levels, shapes and colours that you didn’t know that you had in you.- Horny on main" @Galdrakinn December 13, 2018

Criticism

Challenges picking an instance

• Choosing a particular instance can not only be difficult, but finding one that will have some longevity and treat its users' data respectfully can be spotty.
  • As of 2019-02-23 From the 2017-04-15 Mashable article "Mastodon has an instance for Everyone" only 3 of the 9 Mastodon instances it links to are still up or actually still Mastodon (others are spam, random WordPress, or NSFW squatters)
• Criticism: Server picking usability / UX: https://twitter.com/ashtonpittman/status/1588251480553062401
  • "Trying to sign up for Mastodon but I don't even know what to do once I hit this screen." @ashtonpittman November 3, 2022
• Criticism: jargon in onboarding: https://mastodon.ie/@Ciaraioch/109287818715515862
• ^

User experience

• Criticism: unclear homepage https://twitter.com/imdsm/status/1204795646080892928
  • "I feel as though from spending a few minutes on the http://joinmastodon.org website, it's just not super clear how it works or why I'd use it. I'm not sure if it's the dark mode, or the verbose-yet-detail sparse video, or the confusing navigation to apps. (1/n)" @imdsm December 11, 2019

• Indieweb vs. Fediverse — discussing many of the UX issues with actually interacting and publishing within the Fediverse (meaning Mastodon and Pleroma, mostly)

• Quit: https://twitter.com/hex/status/1519288739750715397
  • "After sleeping on it, obliterated my Mastodon account. Absolutely don't have time in my life for such an enormously retrograde step." @hex April 27, 2022

Lack of privacy

• 2018-08-17 Criticism: DM/PM lack of privacy/encryption: https://mastodon.social/@thomasfuchs/100565509145298900
  • "Just as a heads-up, don’t use PMs/DMs on Mastodon, and if you have to never share any private information.Admins of sending and receiving instances can read those, as there is no end-to-end encryption. Even if you trust the admins, instance ownership could change or hackers or government could get in. Use different tools designed specifically for this." @thomasfuchs August 17, 2018

• 2018-08-16 Criticisms (tweetstorm): https://twitter.com/adrienneleigh/status/1030213888850030592 ([2])
  • "THREAD: In light of so many folks moving to Mastodon/the Fediverse, i want to re-up a couple of threads i did last year about safety and other issues. None of these have gone away, and the increased volume is gonna make them worse, not better." @adrienneleigh August 16, 2018
• 2018-03-25 Privacy, centralization, trust, and: https://twitter.com/SarahJamieLewis/status/978057959686078464
  • "Twitter, let's talk about decentralization and federation and trust and why movements towards federated systems like Mastadon are maybe not where we want to be throwing effort and adoption drives behind if the end goal is privacy-preserving infrastructure." @SarahJamieLewis March 25, 2018

Lack of control

• Criticism: “sign up on this stranger's server” is not really decentralized: https://twitter.com/lightcoin/status/1214293923922874369
  • "not a big fan of Mastodon. imo if a decentralized digital media app's first step is "sign up on this stranger's server" it's not good enough, and over time will probably look like email at best." @lightcoin January 6, 2020
• ^^^ additionally: https://twitter.com/lightcoin/status/1214300933200515073
  • "indeed email has survived but if you run your own server people might never get your emails. it's already getting like that with Mastodon (as your suggestion to avoid http://madtodon.social shows). that's simply not an architecture I can invest energy into/ converting others to." @lightcoin January 6, 2020
• Criticism: users vulnerable to whims of the instance admin: https://twitter.com/widdr/status/1541874233440993280
  • "mastodon federation was a disaster honestly; lacking any means to locate or verify your profile and posts other than the exact instance you went with, every single user was entirely vulnerable to the whims of the shard owner unless they ran their own" @widdr June 28, 2022

Admintax

• Thread: https://twitter.com/rahaeli/status/1036304096280621063
  • "This is why I believe federated social networks are never going to work out long term. Someone who starts an instance doesn't know they're signing up for thousands of hours a year wading through the cloaca of the internet. That shit is *terrible* for you." @rahaeli September 2, 2018

• https://twitter.com/andrewducker/status/1036188250124083200
  • "Mastodon and the challenges of abuse in a federated system https://nolanlawson.com/2018/08/31/mastodon-and-the-challenges-of-abuse-in-a-federated-system/" @andrewducker September 2, 2018

• Another example of overwhelming admintax: https://toot.cafe/@nolan/109308154906981035
  • "Right now I'm exhausted and trying to figure out what to do next. I am heavily tempted to pull a mastodon.technology (https://ashfurrow.com/blog/mastodon-technology-shutdown/), but on the other hand I do still have a lot of sympathy for Mastodon, and I'm encouraged to see that it's finally getting the recognition I think it deserved years ago, back when this Elon mess was just a hypothetical possibility. Also, many folks on toot.cafe are people I consider friends, and so I don't want to leave them in the lurch." @nolan November 8, 2022

Community dynamics

• Criticism: 2018-06-04 I left Mastodon yesterday / Or, the Unfortunately Long Story of Another Badly-Managed Open Source Project that Pushes People Away
  • Follow-up: 2018-06-30 I left Mastodon 27 days ago / A follow-up to “I left Mastodon yesterday”

• Criticism: threads: https://twitter.com/NotE0157H7/status/1347998362465832960
  • "Some bullshit went down last night that really reaffirms my stance that the fediverse and Mastodon is mostly a model of what to not do at this point." @NotE0157H7 January 9, 2021

Doesn't fix core problems of twitter

• Comparison with Twitter, some issues noted, thread: https://twitter.com/xkeepah/status/1511468733746737152
  • ""elon is part of twitter now, time to move to mastodon"
    
    - mastodon has all of the same problems twitter does except for celebrities
    - it also has its own additional fun problems
    
    you will probably hang around mastodon for a few weeks, get bored, and either come back or leave" @xkeepah April 5, 2022
• Distributed toxicity and the IndieWeb: discussion about how the timeline- and quick-response nature of Twitter is what leads to the toxicity on the platform, and how Mastodon doesn't really fix any of that

Other concerns

• 2018-08-16 Criticism: apparent non-priority of losing followers problem: https://edolas.world/objects/97a71361-7ca9-4b93-8c82-ee4efcce921a
  • "@frankmeeuwsen @benwerd
    
    It's completely possible, just not with Mastodon's current architecture. There's a long thread about it on the GitHub issue tracker. The gist is it would require a large change and even if the changes were made, it would be difficult to migrate existing instances.
    
    I think it would be straightforward to design/implement this transition, especially since it's basically a solved problem. But the lead dev is more interested in his other ideas than this feature. :blobcry:" @0x1C3B00DA August 16, 2018
  • Fixed in Mastodon 3.0 (2019): account migration now brings followers along.
    • "You spoke, we listened! Here is the completely revamped account migration system! Easier than ever, and with 3.0 comes the ability to bring your followers with you like magic! Point the old account to the new one, and the new one to the old one, using the new interface, and your followers will be transferred over!" Mastodon 3.0 October 11, 2019

• Criticism: https://twitter.com/retornam/status/1150852938786467840
  • "Mastodon etc don’t work because the network isn’t there. For example I love Signal but all my friends prefer WhatsApp so I’m forced to stay there." @retornam July 15, 2019

• Criticism: rebuilds feudalism: https://twitter.com/swardley/status/1587866413947043847
  • "Me : Whereas Mastodon ... well ... why do tech people keep on trying to rebuild feudalism? It would be quite nice that when you join a server, rather than username they just say "serf" and someone tells you who the nobility of that little kingdom is." @swardley November 2, 2022

Downtime

On 2016-05-02 at 7:05 am IST.

• https://twitter.com/nelson/status/1517152425760546820
  • "My Mastodon instance has been down for two months. I finally accept it's gone. One hidden cost of federation; a lot more partial points of failure. Not sure if I'm going to bother setting up a new account. Mastodon is pretty good tech and a nice community but isolated." @nelson April 21, 2022

Articles

• https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/mastodon-is-like-twitter-without-nazis-so-why-are-we-not-using-it
• https://robek.world/featured/what-is-gnu-social-and-is-mastodon-social-a-twitter-clone/
• http://mashable.com/2017/04/05/mastodon-wont-survive/
• http://boffosocko.com/2017/04/05/mastodon-social-isnt-as-federated-or-as-decentralized-as-the-indie-web/
• 2017-08-01 M for Mastodon: A new logo and v1.5
• 2020-05-22 Fediverse, or a double-edged sword

Instances

• indieweb.me - an Instance for French-speaking IndieWeb users
• IndieWeb.social an Instance for IndieWeb interested users (see also https://jeannie.digital/62/)
• EU has an official mastodon node for EU bodies to post to. It looks like many posts are [PESATAS] from twitter https://social.network.europa.eu/about
• CounterSocial
• https://mnm.social (Redirects to unrelated site as of 2020-02-03)

See Also

• GNU social
• federation
• fediverse
• Bridgy_Fed
• ActivityPub
• Kevin Marks 2017-04-24 Mastodon, Twitter and publics 2017-04-24
• Thread: https://twitter.com/mattl/status/1031418374872616960
  • "Please don’t leave for Mastodon." https://twitter.com/qubyte/status/1031552393375371265
    • "While I'm on Mastodon (and I do enjoy it), I'd much rather we lowered the friction to getting people using their own blogs." @qubyte August 20, 2018
  • To expand a page full of content warning blocks you can run the following in your browser’s console (or turn it into a bookmarklet): for(let a of document.querySelectorAll('.status__content__spoiler-link'))a.click()
  • "Geniune Mastodon Software" (what? separate article maybe?) https://pleroma.site/notice/7439338
    • "Operators are standing by to help you determine if your instance is running genuine Mastodon software or not. Don't live in doubt, find out today. Choose instances running genuine Mastodon software." @mastodongenuineadvantage October 31, 2018
  • Darius Kazemi 2019-07-08 Run your own social: A guide on how to run a small social network site for your friends
  • Mastodon Server Covenant Introducing the Mastodon Server Covenant with descriptions for protections against abuses, encouraging longevity, and data back ups
  • Mastodon Webmention Relay a Glitch project by Mark Everitt to check for new toots by you and relay webmentions to URLs in them.
  • Post with useful diagram of the various timelines https://queer.party/@cassolotl/108195007013414698
    • "A few years ago I made this flow chart of which Mastodon posts end up in which timelines!So, you can see how each instance will have a different local timeline, and even a slightly different federated timeline - and you can see why the federated timeline moves so much faster than the local one, too.This is why it's important to boost good posts and use hashtags - the fediverse is fragmented and harder to search by nature.[ #mastodon #meta #tootorial #howto #mastopedia #mastotip ]" @cassolotl April 25, 2022
  • https://twitter.com/joinmastodon/status/1509005401987194880
    • "IndieWeb is a community of bloggers who use microformats and webmentions (technological evolution of pingbacks) for blog interactions" @joinmastodon March 30, 2022
  • ^
  • Criticism: some Mastodon instances are js;dr, i.e. no longer display content without Javascript, e.g. mstdn.social (https://mstdn.social/@rysiek/109325004388205281) says

    To use the Mastodon web application, please enable JavaScript. Alternatively, try one of the native apps for Mastodon for your platform.

    • "Who Is “Web3” For?
      https://strangematters.coop/web3-vs-fediverse-decentralized-internet/> Like radioactivity, blockchain can be a useful tool in solving certain kinds of problems. Like dental hygiene, the decentralization of global communication platforms is an important problem, but not necessarily the right application for the instrument.> Like Doromad Radioactive Toothpaste, web3 has little to do with solving the stated problem, and everything to do with profiting off of a buzzword, resulting in more harm than good in the process." @rysiek November 11, 2022
  • Criticism: boring (and lots more UX issues noted in replies) https://twitter.com/leahmcelrath/status/1591554897295679488
    • "Mastodon is boring.
      
      I can absolutely see how it’s a good environment for certain types of interactions, but it is not a Twitter replacement for discourse.
      
      It’s the definition of silos." @leahmcelrath November 12, 2022
  • Criticism: high friction for signup and use: https://twitter.com/ibogost/status/1589399381198848001
    • "It’s insane to me that people are pretending Mastodon doesn’t have massive friction for sign up and use. The entire premise of the consumer-internet age, for good and ill, was based on reducing friction as much as possible—especially at signup. You are all kidding yourselves." @ibogost November 6, 2022
  • Criticism: octodon.social banning of jwz Mastodon is going great
  • How to POSSE: https://adactio.com/journal/19645
  • Issue: instances that have rules against "political" content, or requiring "political" content be placed behind Content Warnings: https://mastodon.social/@rocketpilot/109316542216214173
    • "Aus.social's social conventions around political content warnings is raising some hackles. I've seen an Indigenous activist bristle at the idea their entire identity would need a content warning and I think the messaging so far makes it fair for them to feel that way" @rocketpilot November 9, 2022
  • Warning: if you’re considering running an instance, beware of the concerns/hazards documented in: 2022-11-21 A quick hypothetical situation, or, your crash introduction to the real world /

    When you are running a Mastodon server, you are the public policy team, and you are the legal team. Whether you

  • Moderation on Mastodon: there's a lot of work to do
  • Criticism: Mastodon 4 is js;dr 😞 https://mastodon.social/@eevee/109406699726196318
    • "ok so mastodon 4 just made everything js-only and shows //nothing at all// otherwise. what a humiliating step backwards" @eevee November 25, 2022
  • Verifying your WordPress site with Mastodon instructions: https://g13g.blog/2022/11/09/how-to-verify-your-wordpress-site-on-mastodon/
  • Alternate reading interface experiment: https://fasiha.github.io/yoyogi/about
  • Warning for those who want to run a multi-user instance (could apply beyond Mastodon). Thread (feel free to unroll inline here in this page) : https://chaos.social/@leah/109514086537833385
    • "As an experienced admin and #mastoadmin here is my opinion on you running your own instance.Don't. Do. It!I have your attention now? I will explain myself in this short thread. 🧵 👇" @leah December 14, 2022
  • Criticism: Volunteer-run instances may be sold to corporations: https://mastodon.social/@atomicpoet/109550872755815846
    • "Like it or not, it should no longer be assumed that "volunteers" are running your instances. The Mask Group, which now runs three large instances "has raised over US$50 million from private and institutional backers"—their words not mine." @atomicpoet December 21, 2022
  • Issue: may lead to re-centralization in practice: https://toot.wales/@Sbectol/109552247926666522
    • "@HelenGraham again, I think that is more difficult than it might appear. If 75% of all Fediverse users were on a Google instance (say, for example, if it was included free in many data plans) I think it is going to be tough to defederate. Easy to say in theory, hard to do in practice.@Ncstarguy @Natanox @atomicpoet" @Sbectol December 21, 2022
  • Issue: post permalinks of the same post across different servers each show a different subset of the replies to that post, in contrast to IndieWeb examples where there is one canonical post permalink which shows all responses except those blocked/hidden by the original post author: https://fedi.simonwillison.net/@simon/109559268498004036 https://xoxo.zone/@KevinMarks/109559727383581560
    • "My least favourite sharp edge of Mastodon is the fact that when you view someone else's post you only see replies to it that are known to your server - so there's actually a good chance there will be replies that are completely invisible to you, especially if you run your own instanceI'd love it if tapping a post kicked off a request back to the original server that fetched the current reply count and provided a "view all replies" button if there were replies not yet visible to me" @simon December 22, 2022
  • Issue: amplifies the "reply guy" problem because of aforementioned ^ issue of disparate subsets of replies shown, reply guys may not see each others replies and thus think their own reply is clever and unique, while the original poster is inundated: https://infosec.exchange/@k8em0/109559581709013080
    • "@simon that explains so much! Like why the whole Reply guy thing is SO MUCH WORSE here. They perhaps can’t see each other’s replies, making theirs seem unique, while me as the original poster is inundated with repetitive replies like tiny biting ants that just make me never want to picnic here.
      So fixing this for everyone in the way you suggested would not only be more convenient, it will help stop an Only On Mastodon Bad User Experience With Reply Guy Pile Ons phenomenon." @k8em0 December 22, 2022
  • Criticism: UX regression, the timestamp on social media posts has a well established semantic as link to canonical permalink, whereas Mastodon has subverted that in some instances to display a ”local pseudo-permalink” instead, breaking expectations and adding friction to navigating to the original post: https://x0r.be/@carcinopithecus/109559849086288282
    • "@stefan @k8em0 @simon to make things even worse, the "original page" link used to be the timestampit's significantly more friction to reach that original page nowthere was never any reason for this change" @carcinopithecus December 22, 2022
  • more on the problem of subsets of replies that Simon pointed out and some analysis of what’s going wrong with replies & threads on Mastodon: https://social.effy.space/@effy/109562717496743467
  • Criticism (of various Mastodon UX etc.) 2022-12-25 Mastodon Brought a Protocol to a Product Fight / Mastodon vs. Twitter? Come on…
  • Whalebird is a Mastodon, Pleroma, and Misskey client for desktop application with a Slack-like interface.
  • Criticism: replicates many of the poor community behaviors from Twitter: threads: https://twitter.com/IanColdwater/status/1617593805632307202
    • "I posted "we're all in it together 🖤" on Mastodon and got MULTIPLE replies about how actually we're not all in it together and I'm slinking back off of Mastodon now" @IanColdwater January 23, 2023
  • @-@ UX criticism, excess complexity for users, thread: https://twitter.com/nikitabier/status/1618294904538685446
    • "There is a tendency for app designers to create layers & subgroups to deal with complexity:
      Mastodon attempts this with usernames—which have 2 parts.
      
      For every part of your app that you fragment, expect to increase your app’s overall probability of failure by 50%." @nikitabier January 25, 2023
  • POSUM (is this term worth its own page?) for Post to your Own Site Using Mastodon: https://mstdn.ca/@HiMYSYeD/109729495406487649 (especially for the hilarity of the image therein)
    • "POSUM  : Post Own Site Using Mastodon.I just made that up.Describes [my] practice of writing things as Mastodon posts first.Then,Either copying & pasting,or RSS-ingWhat you, okay I,Wrote in those Mastodon toots/posts onto one's self-hosted website or blog.POSUM.PreviouslySometimes people created tweet-threads as public drafts of potential blog posts.Replies to tweets in thread might also end up in one's blog post on their own site.| #Indieweb #Mastodon #POSUM cc: #POSSE" @HiMYSYeD January 21, 2023
  • Issue: heavy admintax warning for would-be self-hosters: 2022-11-15 Mastodon Is Too Heavy for Its Own Good
  • Darius on experimentation (and thread) https://friend.camp/@darius/109746065952541290
    • "I'm confused when devs claim that you can't experiment with software on the fediverse. I have spent the last 5 years of my life building experimental software on the fediverse, and people have been very supportive!There is a MASSIVE design space for weird ideas that are not just dressed-up surveillance capitalism, but so many devs come here saying "I will try out some dressed-up surveillance capitalism" and then act like their genius design thinking is being stymied when people say "fuck off"" @darius January 24, 2023
  • 2022-12-28 Mastodon vs. Twitter: Is Mastodon a True Twitter Alternative?
  • https://toot.cards/ — a service for viewing Mastodon permalinks (requires a particular URL structure)
  • Issue: laws & regulations impacting instance admins are a big admintax burden (and more) 2023-02-01 Financial Times Sets Up Mastodon Server, Realizes Laws Exist (Which It Was Already Subject To), Pulls Down Mastodon Server
  • Issue: @-mentioning someone in a DM automatically cc's them that DM! https://federate.social/@mattblaze/110312563350193781
    • "Another way DMs are hopelessly broken: if your handle is mentioned anywhere in a DM, you get a copy.Yes, I understand why (technically) it might work that way. That doesn't mean it's not broken.DMs here are a dumpster fire of buggy behavior and non-intuitive semantics." @mattblaze May 4, 2023
  • https://mastodoncontentmover.github.io/ "Mastodon Content Mover is a command-line tool that downloads your posts from one Mastodon instance, saving them as a set of files on your computer, and then re-posts them on any other Mastodon instance." (currently in development)
  • 2022-11-07: Les Orchard There are no ushers on Mastodon
  • Stepping stone / onramp to IndieWeb: https://zeroes.ca/@toba/110634539089101736
    • "I'm gonna have to do more #IndieWeb publishing my own content on my own site, aren't I. Mastodon isn't meant to be a long term stable host of content any more than Twitter is, as much as we might wish for it." @toba June 30, 2023
    • and also in https://www.theverge.com/2023/4/20/23689570/activitypub-protocol-standard-social-network

      But the advice you’ll hear from most people in this space is this: own your own domain. Don’t be [email protected] or [email protected]. Have a space that is yours, that belongs to you, a username and identity that can’t disappear just because a company goes out of business or sells to a megalomaniac.

      Emphasis added.
  • Humor: https://mastodon.social/@Chris/110642858112732192
    • "Daily Mastodon trending topic report:1. You’re using it wrong in many ways that personally offend me2. This place was better without any people3. Open-source software4. You’re being polite but not in the way I prefer5. The Fediverse (“fedora universe”)6. Should we de-federate Toyota if they start a server?7. Top 20 Fediverse alternatives to Wikipedia8. Historical evidence that Hitler invented quote tweets9. Cats10. It’s weird how people create accounts but don’t stick around" @Chris July 2, 2023
  • Good rough anecdotal summary of new user / onboarding experiences / criticisms: 2023-07-28 Mastodon is easy and fun except when it isn’t
  • admintax watch and prune excess disk usage https://mastodon.mauve.moe/@mauve/110798794020776063
    • "Whoops, my single user instance with 150 gb of storage got filled up again. 🙃Found this blog post for pruning data and it's helped.https://ricard.dev/improving-mastodons-disk-usage/" @mauve July 29, 2023
  • Using Mastodon to power my blog comments by Graham Macphee 2022-12-19
  • Criticism: 2024-03-20 Mastodon and the Fediverse is too noisy. Why?

    Bottomline, the average Fediverse experience is only a little less addictive and chaotic than Twitter, Instagram, and Threads. The social media giants are such a disappointingly low bar to compare against though.

    via
  • to-do: perhaps opportunity to contribute h-card discovery to Mastodon instead of depending on Webfinger: Ditching the webfinger requirement #17030
  • Features: profile feature: featured tags
  • 2024 instance shutdown: botsin. space: https://stefanbohacek.online/@stefan/113392776797934398
    • "The botsin.space Mastodon server has been a huge part of the fediverse, and while it's sad it's being retired, I trust that the creative botmaking community will continue to thrive."So, given two choices -- asking for more donations so I can pay for more hardware to keep the instance running, or retiring it and encouraging people to support more community-oriented instances, I'll choose the second option every time."https://muffinlabs.com/posts/2024/10/29/10-29-rip-botsin-space/#BotsInSpace #bots #CreativeBots" @stefan October 29, 2024