Don't Tweet, Toot: Understanding Mastodon and the Federated Social Network
Links
General overviews of Mastodon
- 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)
Mastodon instances
- 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
Mobile apps for Mastodon
Mastodon API
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
Similar networks
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.
Relevant protocols
- 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
Running your own Mastodon instance
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.