Mastodon Blog

> I largely agree, but it is odd to write that column and not mention Mastodon/ActivityPub. Is that an omission, or is that because Mastodon is already in the process of "establishing a new legal home for Mastodon and transferring ownership and stewardship"¹, and because ActivityPub was published as a W3C Recommendation back in 2018? ¹ https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2025/01/the-people-should-own-the-town-s…

You would need a server application of some kind for two things: sending your new posts out as activities to your followers, and accepting activities (at least Follow) from the outside world. That application would also need somewhere to store the list of followers and their inboxes (endpoints where you send activities). That's basically it. The actor object itself can be a static file, just don't change its URL. I encourage you to try building your own minimal ActivityPub server — here's a tutorial to get you started: https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2018/06/how-to-implement-a-basic-activit… The sending and receiving parts aren't required to run on the same machine. You can send activities from your laptop, but the receiving side needs to be on a server with a public IP, a domain, HTTPS and all that.

Here's a much more reasonable and informed take on the topic, straight from Mastodon's CEO/founder – https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2023/07/what-to-know-about-threads. Threads will support ActivityPub. They already have UI elements in place for it in the app (like showing your home server domain on your profile), so there's no reason to believe that isn't their intention. The problem, if any, will be on the other end. Plenty of Mastodon/Fediverse servers have already stated their intention of blocking Meta's access to their networks, so even in the best case the end result will be a fragmented mess.

The app update greatly helps - https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2023/07/mastodon-for-android-update/

I don't really see the issue? The instance provides the resources you consume to access Mastodon. In exchange you follow their rules. If you don't like their rules you can move to someone else's instance or even host your own. The process seems pretty simple: https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2019/06/how-to-migrate-from-one-server-t… I don't object in principle to instance admins having a lot of power, precisely because they provide the resources and you can move to some other instance whenever you want. That seems reasonable. There's also nothing preventing you from having multiple Mastodon accounts on multiple instances, including one where you're a responsible member of society and another where you're tooting spicy politics under a pseudonym all day (and the network opts in or out of you as it prefers).

Actually it is not true, you can migrate from instances. You lost all messages but the followers are informed of the change: https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2019/06/how-to-migrate-from-one-server-t…

Also worth noting that it's a fork of Mastodon and they didn't comply with the license requirement initially [1]. Boggles my mind that they didn't just make a new instance to be part of the federation, instead of... reinventing the wheel. [1]: https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2021/10/trumps-new-social-media-platform…

What stands out to me is how empty Twitter is without all those widgets that exist only to juice engagement. The new much older Twitter-inspired default Mastodon layout is how I wish Twitter still was with sidebar widgets serving function instead of investors. https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2019/06/mastodon-2.9/ I don't want a whole column devoted to pushing the latest horrors of the world on me and a bunch of people I don't know or have any interest in following. And that's with ads blocked.

Service list: https://switching.social/ Blog that describes implementing a trivial ActivityPub server: https://blog.joinmastodon.org/

Any platform can wipe your account without notice, and so far as I'm aware, without meaningful legal recourse. Your only assurance against this is regular backups. There are tools you can use to automatically mirror your Mastodon / Fediverse accounts locally, as well as in-app content extraction tools. Content migration isn't implemented yet, and as someone who's migrated a few times more than I can remember (three or four, possibly more), that's a bit of a PITA. But it is on the roadmap, and account migration in general has become far cleaner over the years, see note at bottom of: <https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2019/06/how-to-migrate-from-one-server-t… I've been on the Fediverse since 2016, and in the several times I've migrated things have become far smoother. At present you can migrate your followers, following, and blocked accounts: <https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/moving/> Note that there are few if any proprietary / commercial services which afford anything remotely close to what Mastodon does, though blogging platforms probably permit import/export of content to a greater degree.

Twitter gives people who want to micro-publish to many millions of people very easily a place to do that. Of course, since Twitter stopped providing simple reverse-chronological feeds, it's unclear how many people would actually ever see a given post in their timeline as it was posted, rather than quote-tweets or external links directly to the tweet web page, but point taken. It is possible--although by no means certain--that the fediverse is incapable of handling that particular use case. You asked about email, I'll counter with actual message services. For reasons clear only to the people involved, I have contacts I can only reach via Signal, or via WhatsApp, or via Telegram, or via WeChat, or via Discord, or via Slack, and so on. How do I cope with this? I just do. Similarly, if I had to visit eight different web pages to track my favorite super-popular people, I just would. Or I'd do what I actually do, and follow almost none of them, instead letting people who are terminally online quote and link to the ones worth knowing about. If ActivityPub filled up, and couldn't take on any more users, then I would first expect technical solutions like a sharp rise in relay servers, which combine the output of many servers into one outbox to be polled. After that, assuming there was some sort of hard limit that couldn't be overcome that way, I would expect that I would need to create a new account on some other ActivityPub-like network, or even a separate unfederated network also…

Twitter's censorship created the problem of echo chambers. Twitter was never full on hostile toward conservatives, it was more to do with specific issues/narratives. Conservatives looked at mastodon. Mastodon was worse than twitter, conservatives never made it to mastodon. Mastodon was hostile toward conservatives and this was an unfortunate large mistake. Conservatives built alternatives like parler or gab. But they failed because they were echo chambers. >We’ve been steadily working towards the ultimate goal of providing a viable alternative to Twitter since 2016, and have proven the scalability and resilience of the platform through organic growth over the years. Ironically many of these alternatives like gab stole Mastodon code to operate. Which is very interesting because why couldn't conservatives simply join the mastodon network? As an up and comer you would not only be best suited to invite anyone to your platform. https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2019/07/statement-on-gabs-fork-of-mastod… White supremacists? >listing only such servers that commit to standing up against racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia. Mastodon will never be in the spotlight because they have fallen into the same echo chamber problems. Gab supports free speech? That must make them racist transphobes!

>consider if someone is a proponent for privacy, but isn't sure if the're joining software created by activists they disagree with .. the folks behind Gab Gab is a hilarious example because it is a non-federating fork of Mastodon.[0][1] This is especially noteworthy because the ActivityPub "Fediverse" is full of antipathy between camps of users who run Mastodon (more Left) and those who instead run Pleroma (more Right) to the point where you can predict a user's politics by the software their homeserver is running. Is this the future of FOSS that we want? If you support the right of individuals to run social networks, and if you believe in libre software, you have to understand that sometimes people will use the tools you release for free to do things you disagree with. An analogy: if you're a manufacturer of hammers, you have to accept that someone could use your hammer to commit a murder. [0] https://joinmastodon.org/ [1] https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2019/07/statement-on-gabs-fork-of-mastod…

In 1000 years we will have ascended :) but if not, I hope to be chilling on Risa somewhere! In all seriousness, in the future I suspect we will use a combination of these types of capabilities but they will all be linked together in a way that prevents totalitarian control of speach. I think some of the best technologies today are keybase.io matrix.org briarproject.org and community.mattermost.com My view is that the next emerging social network will be based on a secure and self hostable compute fabric that leverages zero trust compute and secure compute, data sharing, etc. I think Urbit had the right direction but went crazy and lost the plot. I'm working on this problem personally and I hope to be in alpha / beta testing for certain aspects of the platform by end of year :) Feel free to reach out if you want some additional details. I think it pays a lot of dividends to understand some of the history of the past so that we can learn from them as we look to build something better for the future, so I’ve decided to publish some of my thoughts on this topic and also share some of my findings with the community so that nobody has to go down this massive rabbit hole again in the near term. History of Social…

https://blog.joinmastodon.org/ lists 25.6.18 as the date.

Maybe this would have helped with something like Mastodon losing non-profit status? https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2024/04/mastodon-forms-new-u.s.-non-prof…

Here's more information on that: https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2025/11/the-future-is-ours-to-build-toge… > For our team, a vital aspect of getting this restructuring right was making sure that Eugen was compensated fairly for Mastodon’s brand trademark, assets, and the 10 years he spent building Mastodon into what it is today (while taking less than a fair market salary). Based on replacement costs, Eugen’s time and effort, and the fair market value of the Mastodon brand, its associated properties, and the social network, we settled on a one-time compensation of EUR 1M.

Related: The Future Is Ours to Build – Together https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2025/11/the-future-is-ours-to-build-toge… Mastodon: Building for the Long Term https://www.patreon.com/posts/building-for-137854404

From https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2025/11/the-future-is-ours-to-build-toge…

> We deeply appreciate the generosity of Jeff Atwood and the Atwood Family (EUR 2.2M), Biz Stone, AltStore (EUR 260k), GCC (EUR 65k), and Craig Newmark. > We want to thank the generous individual donors that participated in our fundraising drive. We put individual donations entirely towards Mastodon’s operations (primarily, paying our full-time employees to improve Mastodon), which totalled EUR 337k over the past 12 months (September 2024 - September 2025). From https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2025/11/the-future-is-ours-to-build-toge…

> I have no idea why Gab was partially excluded https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2019/07/statement-on-gabs-fork-of-mastod… https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19847481

This is one reason why Mastodon is setting up a new non-profit to avoid this. https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2025/01/the-people-should-own-the-town-s…

The largest Mastodon deployment is truth social. https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2021/10/trumps-new-social-media-platform…

Technically, Threads uses ActivityPub and is federated with other Mastodon instances (and technically the rest of the fediverse that haven't federated from Meta). https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2023/07/what-to-know-about-threads/ I suppose the ads are mostly displayed through the Threads app and web server? Otherwise I don't see the Fediverse taking it kindly with being polluted with ads from Meta.

Some of the changes are listed here: https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2024/10/mastodon-4.3/

is that why they're trying to implement better suggestions and discovery algorithms (https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2024/10/mastodon-4.3/) just to get people to stick on their website even a little bit cause otherwise it's just kinda dead

Is this doc page incorrect, https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2019/06/how-to-migrate-from-one-server-t… > On this page you can also download a copy of your archive that can be read by any ActivityPub software. This archive includes all of your posts and media. So even if the instance that you are moving from shuts down, as is the case with KNZK, you will still have a copy of all of your posts!

Most people are probably on the 3 biggest instances and the "official" instances don't have it blocked as far as I can see (https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2023/07/what-to-know-about-threads/). Blocking also seems like a silly thing for a network that is about being open and interoperable.

Thankfully, we're seeing a surge of alternate options. Mastodon's user base continues to grow and add user focused features [1], Firefox performance is on-par with Chrome, Bing/duckduckgo reached Google's search quality a while back and now exceed it since Google search added shit. 1. https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2023/09/mastodon-4.2/

> And then there's the implication that you're supposed to choose a server based on some "interests" or "values." No. That's an easy fix: Go to https://joinmastodon.org/ click Join mastodon.social > search You might like the latest release: https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2023/09/mastodon-4.2/ > In this version we overhauled search.