Mastodon

Tongiht I'm going to be talking about a new social network called Mastodon.

Mastodon functions just like the other microbloging network. You toot instead of tweet and it has a 500 character limit instead of 140.

But Mastodon has some awesome features that traditional microblogs don’t have.

Social networks aren’t doing enough to protect people from harassment and have no interested in protecting users privacy.

This has made many social networks an unwelcoming environment for people.

Mastodon offers better tools for privacy and fighting harassment than any other social networks.

This is done though a superior blocking system (that can be by the user or instance) and a community of people who actually care.

Also allowing users to mark their content with Content Warnings and NSFW tags allows for a better community to foster.

Mastodon is currently be developed on GitHub under the GNU Affero license.

Which means you can run your own Mastodon instance today for your community or in single user mode.

Mastodon uses the OStatus platform for decentralisation which allow an individual instance to connect to the “feedverse” of instances.

OStatus is a combination of multiple W3C Social Activity standards.

You can find a Mastodon instances to join at instances.mastodon.xyz.

Awesome Mastodon Instances

Here are four Mastodon instances I can reconmend.

You can also run a Mastodon instance in single user mode. This basically means the root for your website will redirect to your profile.

So someone is probably getting ready to yell, "WHAT ABOUT GNU SOCIAL".

GNUSocial uses the OStatus platform so you can have a social network dance party and all your friends can be invited.

But not Bob, because he hasn’t upgrade his instances of GnuSocial yet.

It's available in lots of languages (including Occitan).

It’s full of small communities where people are doing what stye love for the sake of doing it.

You can follow me on Mastodon at myles.life/@me.

If you have any questions you can email me @ me@mylesb.ca.