- Join Mastodon (official, general-purpose)
- Resources for Mastodon Newbies (large list of links to resources)
- Toot How-To: Intro to Mastodon (friendly, lots of gifs)
- What I wish I knew before joining Mastodon (also friendly, also lots of gifs)
- Mastodon tutorial (another friendly introduction)
- Mastodon: like Twitter, but open and federated (technical details)
- A new challenger to Twitter's walled garden: Mastodon (from FSF, contextualizes Mastodon as just one of many OStatus-based federated social networks)
- The canonical (manually-curated) list of Mastodon instances. Allows you to search for instances that match particular criteria (language, user count, moderation, etc.)
- tooter.today uses a scoring procedure to suggest good instances to join
- Radar: a map of the Fediverse (all OStatus-compatible instances on the web)
A few instances of interest:
- mastodon.social: the flagship Mastodon site, where Mastodon developer Eugen makes his home. (I'm on there too)
- oulipo.social: a Mastodon instance that doesn't allow you to post toots containing the letter 'e'
- botsin.space: a Mastodon instance specifically for creative bots
Mastodon has an API, which looks sorta like the Twitter API. (This is in addition to Mastodon's support for OStatus.)
- API documentation
- List of libraries for working with the Mastodon API
- I made a Mastodon bot in Python called Icebox Breakfast. Source code here
Other federated/distributed/peer-to-peer social networking systems:
- Usenet
- FidoNet
- SMTP (i.e., e-mail)
- RSS, hey remember Google Reader
- Napster, hey remember MP3s
- Scuttlebutt, a peer-to-peer social network (no servers!)
etc.
- OStatus, which is a cobination of...
- Atom Activity Streams for social media feeds (you can see the Atom data for my mastodon.social account here)
- PubSubHubbub for real-time updates (good intro here)
- Salmon for threaded comments
Mastodon is a Ruby on Rails application and you can run it on your own server!
- Up and running with Docker
- Installing on DigitalOcean
- Even more instructions
- If you want your own instance but don't want to install anything, try masto.host.
Please mention Tooter - a client for Sailfish OS. I have the link in my fork - https://gist.github.com/abhijithb21/eb4866eaaf42fecb8b3346db691ffdc8 .