What is Mastodon?

Mastodon is free social media and microblogging platform, similar to Twitter. Unlike Twitter, Mastodon is open-source software for decentralized, with a large number of independently run nodes, known as instances, each with its own code of conduct, terms of service, privacy policy, privacy options, and content moderation policies. Each user of Mastodon is a member of a specific Mastodon instance (also called a server), which can interoperate as a federated social network, allowing users on different instances to interact with each other. This is intended to give users the flexibility to select a node whose policies they prefer, but keep access to a larger social network. Because Mastdon is open source and decentralized, anyone in the world can host their own instance. This option is especially popular with ethusiasts or those that have concerns about data privacy and security.

As of spring 2023, Mastodon's usage is on the rise and continues to grow. Some of this is attributed to Elon Musk's purchase of Twitter in April 2022. After the annoucement, Mastodon gained 30,000 new users of the span of a few days. As on January 2023, Mastodon has 1.8 million active users, with a total of 10 million users in total.

In an interview with Time Magazine, the creator of Mastodon, Eugen Rochko, stated the following

Being able to express myself online to my friends through short messages was actually very important to me, important also to the world, and that maybe it should not be in the hands of a single corporation that can just do whatever it wants with it

Self Hosted Instance

I self host a Mastodon instance for myself. I though it would be exciting and rewarding to be in charge of maintaining a instance for myself. It was also a bit of a stuggle, as I did not have a great understanding of how to self host a server in a secure manner. I knew I wanted to host it through a Cloudflare tunnel to give my home network some extra protection, as well as avoiding opening a port publicly or using port forwarding. After many hours of troubleshooting I was finally able to connect to my instance externally. Addionally, I maintain a > 99% uptime on my instance.

If you are interested in joining Mastodon, I've included a link to join the official Mastodon instance, hosted by Mastodon gGmbH non-profit. I've also included a link to my instance. If you are interested in joining my instance, shoot me a email at [email protected] and I'll create you an account. I currently do not have a way to register for an account automatically on my instance to avoid fake or bot accounts from being created.