Mastodon
More info
- Creator
- Eugen Rochko
- Released
- Owner
- Mastodon gGmbH
- Type
- Federated microblog
- License
- AGPL-3.0
- Website
- joinmastodon.org
- Source
- github.com/mastodon
- Wikipedia
- en.wikipedia.org
Federated microblog platform — open source (AGPL), launched in 2016 by Eugen Rochko, made popular in 2022 in the wake of Musk's Twitter purchase.
Speaks ActivityPub. Usernames look like @user@instance.tld (analogous to email). No algorithms in the home feed — strictly chronological. Default 500 characters per "toot" (now "post"). Moderation policy and rules set per instance.
Written in Ruby on Rails + Postgres + Redis + Sidekiq. Peaked at ~2.5 million monthly actives in 2022, has stabilised around 1 million. Fediverse competitors: Pleroma, Misskey/Sharkey, Friendica.