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Mastodon (social network)

For other uses, see Mastodon (disambiguation).

Mastodon
Original author(s)Eugen Rochko[1]
Developer(s)Mastodon gGmbH[2]
Initial release16 March 2016 (2016-03-16)[3]
Stable release
4.2.12 / August 19, 2024
Preview release
4.2.0-rc2 / September 19, 2023 (2023-09-19)
Repository
Written inRuby on Rails, JavaScript (React.js, Redux)
Operating systemCross-platform
PlatformiOS, Android, Linux, BSD, macOS, Microsoft Windows
Available in93 languages[4]
TypeMicroblogging
LicenseAGPLv3+[5]
Websitejoinmastodon.org Edit this at Wikidata
A cartoon Mastodon mascot
The mascot of the Mastodon social network

Mastodon is free and open-source software for running self-hosted social networking services.[a] It has microblogging features similar to Twitter, which are offered by a large number of independently run nodes, known as instances or servers, each with its own code of conduct, terms of service, privacy policy, privacy options, and content moderation policies.[6][7][8]

Each user is a member of a specific Mastodon server that can interact seamlessly with users in any other server. This is intended to give users the flexibility to select a server whose policies they prefer, while being able to communicate within a greater federated social network. Mastodon is powered by the ActivityPub protocol, making it a part of the fediverse and able to communicate with other services that support it such as Lemmy, Pixelfed, Misskey, PeerTube and Pleroma.

Mastodon was created by Eugen Rochko and revealed to the public via Hacker News in October 2016.[9] Not long after, it quickly gained popularity and became the dominant platform in the fediverse and overtaking the previous leader, GNU social. It gained significant adoption in 2022 following the acquisition of Twitter by Elon Musk.[10][11][12]

The project is maintained by the German non-profit Mastodon GmbH.[13] Development of Mastodon is crowd-funded, and does not contain any support for advertisements or monetized features.

  1. ^ Lekach, Sasha (6 April 2018). "The coder who built Mastodon is 24, fiercely independent, and doesn't care about money". Mashable. Retrieved 6 November 2019.
  2. ^ "The company behind Mastodon". joinmastodon.org.
  3. ^ "v0.1.0". 16 March 2016. Retrieved 18 July 2019 – via GitHub.
  4. ^ English plus 92 translations listed in "Mastodon translations in Crowdin". Crowdin. Retrieved 8 November 2022.
  5. ^ "mastodon/mastodon". Mastodon. 5 November 2022.
  6. ^ Chan, Wilfred (2 November 2022). "Mastodon gained 70,000 users after Musk's Twitter takeover. I joined them". The Guardian. Retrieved 3 November 2022.
  7. ^ Farokhmanesh, Megan (7 April 2017). "A beginner's guide to Mastodon, the hot new open-source Twitter clone". The Verge. Retrieved 4 February 2021.
  8. ^ Wong, Joon Ian (6 April 2017). "How to use Mastodon, the Twitter alternative that's becoming super popular". Quartz. Retrieved 4 February 2021.
  9. ^ "Show HN: A new decentralized microblogging platform". 5 October 2016. Retrieved 31 October 2022.
  10. ^ Cite error: The named reference :3 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  11. ^ Cite error: The named reference MSN1 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  12. ^ Cite error: The named reference CNET1 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  13. ^ Knight, Will. "The Man Behind Mastodon Built It for This Moment". Wired. ISSN 1059-1028. Retrieved 5 March 2023.


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