Mastodon in the News
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Mastodon: What is the social network hailed as a Twitter alternative?
While Mastodon is busier than ever before, it still has few of the big names from politics and showbiz that have made Twitter an addictive online home for journalists in particular. Few know comic Jan Boehmermann – Germany’s answer to John Oliver – outside his country, but climate activist Greta Thunberg is globally known.
For Rochko, the project’s only full-time employee, programming at his home in a small town in eastern Germany for a modest 2,400 euro monthly salary, the work continues.
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Why Mastodon Search Seems So Unclear
Explaining the cultural dynamics that have led Mastodon to have a search engine that barely works by traditional standards.
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Twitter Users Have Caused a Mastodon Meltdown
As Twitter has a public meltdown, Mastodon is having a quieter one. Its decentralized nature appeals to those who hate Musk’s unilateral control over Twitter, but that key feature is also working against it—Mastodon was not prepared to host millions of people in a short span of time. Some of the most popular servers that feed users into the network are overloaded with the fury of new activity, and volunteer administrators of the more than 4,000 instances, or servers, cannot keep up with new user requests to join and the volume of posts. Plus, new users are hitting a steep learning curve.
“What the platform owners and the instance administrators need to make sure is, it’s somehow sustainable,” says Aravindh Raman, an internet measurements researcher with the telecommunications company Telefónica who has studied Mastodon.
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Automatic Feed to Mastodon
Our Twitter and Facebook feeds, however, are automatically delivered from our RSS (using dlvr.it)—if we had to manually post each item, we'd constantly forget or err. Do any of you know whether it's possible to easily set up an automatic feed to a Mastodon account? Thanks!
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An escape pod was jettisoned during the fighting
Mastodon is an open-sourced Twitter alternative running as part of something called “the Fediverse.” Unlike platforms like Twitter or Facebook, Mastodon is federated. That means it’s decentralised. There isn’t just one central site where you can go and sign up, like you do for Twitter; instead there are lots of sites all of which talk to each other using a protocol called ActivityPub.
You can sign up to any Mastodon site — which are called instances — and you can follow folks who are on your own, or on any other, instance which is part of the fediverse. Instances all talk to each other, so which instance you’re on doesn’t generally make much of a difference to who you can follow, or who can follow you.
However, your instance is your “local community.” The instance you join could be for you and your friends, or it could be about what you do in your spare time, or for work. For instance, there are communities built around special interest groups like open-source software or cyber security, and geographical ones, like Scotland.