Mastodon is open source, distributed social networking software. It’s most similar to Twitter in terms of core functionality, but what sets it apart is the ability to setup your own instance or join one that fits your interests. Mastodon takes advantage of ActivityPub, allowing users on the service to follow others from separate instances.

And because ActivityPub isn’t Mastodon-specific, you can follow users from instances that aren’t even built on Mastodon. It’s compatible with Pixelfed, PeerTube, Pleroma, and more — as long as it uses ActivityPub, you can follow it through Mastodon, at least in my experience.

My first exposure to Mastodon was in 2018, but it was short-lived. I made the mistake of trying to rebuild the same social graph I had on Twitter and no one stuck around for very long — including me. It wasn’t until I started exploring Twitter alternatives earlier this year that I started using Mastodon as my primary social network.

I could have just revived my account on Mastodon.social, but one of the biggest draws for me was the ability to have my own instance. I setup LibertyNode.net in July, invited my wife and sister-in-law to join, and haven’t looked back.

If you’re interested in giving Mastodon a go, you could join one of the bigger instances like Mastodon.social or Mastodon.online. Alternatively, you could use Instances.social to try and find one that’s focused more on your interests.

Once you have an account, you’ll probably want some cool people to follow. Your instance’s profile directory as well as the local and federated feeds are a good place to start. Just keep in mind, because of the open source nature of the software and the ability for anyone to setup an instance, just like the web in general, there is some degree of unsavoriness. A good instance will be moderated regularly to prevent the most egregious content, but just a fair warning that some could slip through.

In terms of specific people to follow, though, I’d be more than happy to have you as a follower — you can find my personal account at @mike@libertynode.net and Initial Charge’s account at @initialcharge@libertynode.net. And here are some of the people I’ve especially enjoyed on Mastodon recently:

• Mike Harley — @obsolete29@indieweb.social
• Marko Saric — @markosaric@fosstodon.org
• Arun — @aruns@fosstodon.org
• Chris Wiegman — @chris@mastodon.chriswiegman.com
• Colin Devroe — @cdevroe@mastodon.social
• Geotechland — @geotechland@fosstodon.org
• Pete Moore — @pimoore@writing.exchange
• Tom Brand — @Eggfreckles@mastodon.mit.edu

You shouldn’t feel stuck just following people that are native to ActivityPub, though. BirdsiteLive is self-host-able bridge between Twitter and Mastodon. I use this for a couple dozen people or so that don’t yet have a presence on an ActivityPub-compatible service.

You can use the main BirdsiteLive instance, but I would recommend looking for other, smaller instances that aren’t quite as saturated. Distributing your follows across multiple instances will help prevent Twitter from shutting it down through rate limiting or some other mechanism.

Beyond that, there are a handful of other tools I use that interact with Mastodon:

• The official Mastodon app for iOS — there are still some rough edges and missing features, but development has been rapid so far.
• Metatext is a third-party client for iOS that’s more feature complete, but hasn’t seen as much active development recently.
• Mastonaut is my favorite Mastodon client for macOS.
• Mastodon-Twitter cross-poster automatically cross-posts your tweets to Mastodon or vice versa. This is what I use to mirror my Mastodon posts to my Twitter account.
• Mastodon Autopost for WordPress will automatically post a link to your Mastodon account each time you publish. I don’t love it’s use of custom fields for storing information, but it works well.

As it stands now, there is some political polarization on the Mastodon and that may get worse if the upcoming Truth Social decides to federate. But that same polarization exists in many other aspects of our lives now, so it isn’t a unique problem. However, unlike other social networks, the distributed nature of Mastodon could help to prevent some of the more toxic behavior that the polarization leads to on Twitter, Facebook, and others.

Each instance can have its own policies regarding moderation and can decide what instances to federate with or not. This allows communities to setup a firewall from the type of behavior that they would like to discourage. And if you don’t like one instance’s policies, you can find another instance or even setup your own. I used Cloudron on Linode to install and manage Mastodon, it was a pretty easy process.

I haven’t needed to do any instance blocking on mine yet, but there’s only a few of us on it and we’ve only been using it since July. I’m glad the option is there if I ever need it.

I’m quite bullish on Mastodon and ActivityPub in general. I think it’s the kind of software that churches, bands, and any other group should take into consideration if they want to establish a place to congregate online. And I very well may be doing some of this myself.

There isn’t an Apple-focused Mastodon instance that I’m aware of and having something like that might encourage some of my Twitter buddies to give it a try. I can’t say for certain whether I’ll set one up, but it’s on my radar. And if anyone out there is interested in collaborating on something like this, let me know.

There’s about a quarter-of-a-million monthly active users on Mastodon, based on the instances known to Mastodon.social. It’s no Twitter or Facebook, but that’s a pretty sizable number considering the lack of major investors or marketing.

➝ Source: blog.joinmastodon.org

From Truth Social:

Our goal is to support the open source community no matter what your political beliefs are. That’s why the first place we go to find amazing software is the community and not “Big Tech”.

There was quite a bit of noise last month regarding Truth Social’s potential violation of Mastodon’s license. I’m happy to hear that they have released their source code, coming into complience with the licensing agreement.

Regardless of your political affiliation, I think it’s good that there will be more competition for Facebook and Twitter soon. And It’s even better that it’s built on Mastodon. I hope they federate — allowing Truth Social users to follow people from other instances and other instances to follow users on Truth Social. More importantly, though, I hope the existence of this service results in many more people joining social networks powered by ActivityPub.

➝ Source: truthsocial.com

A bridge allowing you to follow Twitter accounts on Mastodon. It’s against Twitter’s developer rules, but it can be self-hosted, which will make it more resilient against Twitter shutting it down. I’d share the instance I’m using, but I’d rather it fly under the radar.

➝ Source: github.com

Steve Satterfield, Director of Privacy and Public Policy at Facebook:

To give people more control and choice over their data, today we’re introducing two new data portability types, Facebook posts and notes. People can now directly transfer their notes and posts to Google Docs, Blogger and WordPress.com. These updates extend the reach of the tool that already enables people to transfer their photos and videos to Backblaze, Dropbox, Google Photos and Koofr. To better reflect the range of data types people can now transfer to our partners’ services, we’re renaming the tool “Transfer Your Information.”

If you still have a Facebook account, you should export your data and then delete your account.

➝ Source: about.fb.com

If your Twitter timeline looks anything like mine, you probably see someone posing a question to their followers at least once or twice each day. Maybe you offer an answer or maybe you just scroll past because it’s a topic you’re unfamiliar with. Maybe you’re just too busy to find the answer or maybe you don’t know. Regardless, I think we should all strive to be more helpful to the folks in our timeline and give them a greater opportunity to find the answer they’re looking for.

I made a rule for myself a few years ago that I try my best to stick to:

Always answer if I can and retweet if I can’t.

I only have about four hundred followers on Twitter, but I can’t tell you how many times a retweet to my relatively small number of followers resulted in the surfacing of an answer. And I can’t tell you how appreciative I’ve been when someone retweeted my question to amplify its visibility.

We have the Internet at our fingertips — more information than you could ever imagine. But finding the correct answer to some obscure or specific questions are still far more difficult than you’d expect. That’s why people ask questions on social networks. Many of these tweets are a last resort after countless Google searches and YouTube videos that are unable to provide them with enough information.

Twitter users that have massive followings can probably get an answer to just about any question within a few minutes. But for everyone else, a retweet goes a long way to get an unanswered question to someone that can help.

M.G. Siegler, with a great take on the Twitter API situation. I especially liked this bit:

What I think Twitter (and again, others) miss is that it’s not so much about the explicit influence, it’s far more implicit. And some of it is painfully obvious. It’s the fact that such users are often the most devoted, caring, and passionate ones. And sometimes, they’re at the forefront of what the rest of the user base will eventually feel because they’re so into the product. Other times they offer a power user perspective, which can be useful at times in showing how the product works (and doesn’t) in the ultimate “success state” of extreme usage. There are many other simple, subtle things that could be mentioned here.

It’s foolish to abandon users that contribute so much to the service.

Andy Piper, writing on Twitter’s weblog:

Later this year, we’ll be launching a new developer experience that combines the free and easy access of the standard REST and streaming APIs with the enterprise-grade power and reliability of Gnip. The goal is to create an integrated Twitter API platform that serves everyone, from an individual developer testing a new idea to Twitter’s largest enterprise partners. This will simplify and strengthen our developer platform so that anyone building with us can confidently create and scale their applications, products, and businesses.

I believe developer relations is a crucial component to the long-term sustainability of Twitter as a business. I just hope they manage to make this happen without pissing off too many developers.