It’s Mastodon 3.3 time 🎉 We’ve got security fixes, performance fixes, new moderation tools and quality of life features!
Reversible suspensions
The main change in this release of Mastodon is our approach to suspensions. Previously, suspending an account deleted all of its as...
An ever growing problem of the modern social media-rich world is misinformation. The trust that was previously placed into government officials and journalism has eroded; the internet gave everyone a voice but with it made it so much more difficult to distinguish truth from ...
The new Mastodon release brings you a much better audio player and improved support for different audio and video formats, as well as some additional security mechanisms.
The audio player has been completely reworked to have a more eye-catching design. It will extract album ...
Since Mastodon 2.7, it is actually possible to let users sign up through your app, instead of asking them to go to a Mastodon website directly and then return. Let’s go over how this can be done.
First, not all Mastodon servers accept new users. If you perform a request to G...
New REST APIs
Profile directory
The profile directory is a way to discover users who want to be discovered. To fetch the profile directory, access GET /api/v1/directory with the possible params local (boolean) and order (new or active). Pagination is accomplished using offse...
It’s finally here! Mastodon 3.0 is live! The team has been hard at work on making sure that this release is one of our most user-friendly yet with some exciting new features! Here are just a few:
Stronger anti-harassment tools
We’re always looking for new ways to provide use...
After crowdfunding millions of dollars, social media platform Gab abandoned its own code and switched to the freely available Mastodon software in early 2019 as a way of circumventing Google’s and Apple’s ban on their own app from their app stores, since offering Mastodon’s ...
One of the biggest obstacles for new users to Mastodon has been the multi-column UI. For users accustomed to the single-column layouts of Twitter or Tumblr, Mastodon’s multi-column layout can be overwhelming. At Mastodon, we want users’ first-day experience with us to be a p...
With the sad news that KNZK was shutting down we thought it might be useful for people to have a refresher on the features that Mastodon has built in that make moving instances easy and painless.
Backing up Your Data
Data export
If you are moving to a new instance th...
Although Mastodon has no central authority, we as a project still want to provide a safer experience than found on Twitter or Reddit. One of the things that gave impetus to the creation of Mastodon was a lack of moderation on Twitter against hate groups. The “no nazis” rule ...
The latest point release of Mastodon adds a small new feature that might have a significant impact on all adult content creators on the platform. The feature has a fancy, memorable name: Blurhash. But first, let’s talk about how adult content works on Mastodon.
Mastodon allo...
In this long-awaited release: Polls, new tools for managing followers, new frontpage design, new admin features, Keybase integration, and more.
A poll
Mastodon now has a poll feature. Instead of attaching images or video to your post, you can ask your followers to ch...
We have published a 1-click install image on DigitalOcean. This reduces the initial time investment in self-hosting Mastodon substantially. You create a new droplet, choose the Mastodon image, and once it boots up, you are taken through an interactive setup prompt.
The only ...
Can you imagine Facebook closing registrations and saying “Sorry, we have too many users already, you can go sign up on Twitter instead”? And yet, this sort of situation comes up with Mastodon every so often, in regards to the mastodon.social server.
You see, Mastodon is dec...
Polish translation is available: Mastodon 2.7
The fresh release of Mastodon brings long-overdue improvements to discoverability of content and the administration interface, as well as a large number of bug fixes and extra polish.
The 2.7 release consists of 376 commits by 3...
Japanese translation is available: なぜ脱中央集権（decentralization）が重要なのか？
I’ve been writing about Mastodon for two whole years now, and it occurred to me that at no point did I lay out why anyone should care about decentralization in clear and concise text. I have, of course, exp...
Inspired by a joke post I decided to go ahead and compile a list of the most shared things on Mastodon in 2018.
Of course, given the federated nature of the platform, this list may be incomplete, as I can only query information known to the mastodon.social server. I’ve also curated the list a little by excluding toots that were asking to be boosted, toots from me and the official Mastodon account, as well as most things that could be considered merely announcements to current users.
After Apple has delisted the Tumblr app from its store citing a large amount of adult content on the site, artists and other creators are reporting having their blogs deleted, and are now looking for alternatives. Before choosing another commercial solution like Twitter, let...
After more than a month of work, I am happy to announce the new version of Mastodon, with improved visuals, a new way to assert your identity, and a lot of bug fixes.
Verification
Verifying identity in a network with no central authority is not straightforward. But there is ...
Mastodon was first announced to the public through Hacker News, a link aggregator site for programmers, on October 6, 2016. Now we’re celebrating the 2 year anniversary! 🎉
Network growth
From 45 registered users on mastodon.social, the only Mastodon server at the time...
Mastodon 2.5 is the 100th released version of Mastodon since the project’s inception almost 2 years ago. It brings a variety of improvements to the software, the full list of which is available in the changelog.
Public profile page
The public areas of the web interfa...
Polish translation is available: Przewodnik po Mastodonie
So you want to join Mastodon and get tooting. Great! Here’s how to dive straight in.
Let’s start with the basics. What is this?
Mastodon is a microblogging platform akin to others you may have seen, such as Twitter, ...
A year ago I wrote about Mastodon’s improvements over Twitter’s lacking protections against abuse and harassment. Development in that area has not been standing still, and it’s about time we do another comparison.
First, a refresher on the fundamentals, which haven’t changed...
In the previous tutorial we have learned how to send a reply to another ActivityPub server, and we have used mostly static parts to do it. Now it’s time to talk about how to subscribe to other people and receive messages.
The inbox
Primarily this means having a publicly acce...
We often tout things like “Mastodon is based on open web protocols” as one of its advantages. I want to elaborate why exactly that’s a good thing.
As a refresher, Mastodon implements the so-called ActivityPub protocol to enable Mastodon servers to talk to each other; that’s ...
Polish translation is available: Dlaczego musimy sprzeciwić się nowej dyrektywie o prawie autorskim
A committee of members of the European Parliament have voted to approve Article 11 and Article 13, which pose a risk to the decentralization of the web and freedom of creativ...
I follow many talented artists on Mastodon, and over my 2 years of being on the platform I have noticed some common patterns that may help a newcomer find their audience on here, too.
Introduce yourself
A lot of the toots that get shared around widely are artists’ introducti...
Today we’ll be looking at how to connect the protocols powering Mastodon in the simplest way possible to enter the federated network. We will use static files, standard command-line tools, and some simple Ruby scripting, although the functionality should be easily adaptable ...
A fresh new release of the federated social network software is here, and while the primary focus of it has been on fixing bugs and improving performance, it brings a couple of notable new features to the board.
Delete & Redraft
There are legitimate reasons why social me...
Deep down you always knew it. On the edge of your perception, you always heard the people who talked about the erosion of privacy, that there was no such thing as free cheese, that if you don’t pay — then you’re the product. Now you know that it’s true. Cambridge Analytica h...
