Adventures with the mastodon herd
All of the recent changes at Twitter inspired me to take a second look at mastodon. In short, mastodon is a federated social network that feels a bit like someone took Twitter and split it up into a vast network of independent servers. Why mastodon? # It feels a lot like Twitter, but better. You can search for people, follow them, and publish messages (called toots). They can also follow you and see the messages you publish. The big difference is that you don’t join a central server with mastodon. There’s a massive network of servers to choose from and you can create accounts on one or more of those servers to get started. You can even run your own! Mastodon reminds me of email for many reasons: There’s no central server. You join a server (from the massive, growing list) and start publishing messages. Everything is on an eventual consistency model. If a mastodon server goes offline for a bit or has network issues, messages and other data will synchronize when it’s back online.