Mastodon

 Mastodon  is an open source social network project that supports some IndieWeb building blocks like microformats2 & rel-me, and has a federation of many instances, including https://indieweb.social/ for IndieWeb fans.

IndieWeb sites interact Mastodon instances directly & via Bridgy Fed. Mastodon is largest deployment of ActivityPub support and also has some compatibility with GNU social. As self-described in a 2021-09-29 tweet: "'Mastodon, your cryptocurrency-free decentralized social network. No blockchains, no NFTs, no attempting to turn every social interaction into a microtransaction'"


 * Homepage of the original instance
 * GitHub

Features
(this section is a stub, please expand!)

Feature summary:
 * profile - ability to create an account / profile with
 * photo
 * bio (with autolinked URLs)
 * h-feed
 * posts
 * notes (default limit of 500 characters but some instances have raised this, sometimes considerably)
 * content warning to hide a note behind warning text, requiring a click to view
 * responses
 * mention
 * reply
 * favorite (star)
 * boost - repost
 * notifications
 * notifications
 * notifications

Specific feature details:

Profile
(stub)

Mastodon profiles show various information:



Mastodon’s h-feed support is better than their Atom support!
 * following someone's mastodon microformats feed gives a much better result than their atom! -

E.g. screenshot when trying to follow:



And display of an item from a Mastodon h-feed:



Notifications
(stub)

Mastodon has a notifications page that shows various items such as when others react to your posts:

https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/778068/31188595-47530aca-a8ea-11e7-9a34-498935f47cb0.png

WebSub
The Atom feeds allow push notifications via WebSub, although this along with Atom support are considered legacy from its OStatus origins.

Federated Reply Interfaces
An interface for prompting the act of posting content from their preferred ActivityPub service of choice.



IndieWeb Examples
IndieWeb folks using Mastodon accounts, in particular POSSEing from their IndieWeb site to Mastodon and/or backfeeding responses from Mastodon copies of posts back to their IndieWeb site.

If you’re directly interacting with Mastodon posts on other servers from your site, you should add your site instead to:
 * If you’re using Bridgy Fed to federate your posts so people on Mastodon servers can follow you directly then add yourself to: IndieWeb Examples using Bridgy Fed
 * If your server itself is directly interacting with Mastodon and other ActivityPub supporting services with Bridgy or another intermediary service, add yourself to: IndieWeb Examples supporting ActivityPub

Please copy the === Add yourself! === section and add yourself with permalinks to different/interesting examples and dates of when you first started interacting in those ways!

Other Examples
https://abhinavsarkar.net/microblog/ PESOS’s their Mastodon posts:
 * https://fantastic.earth/@abnv/109527296195422044 "A reminder that you can pull your posts from your #Mastodon server using the RSS feed or the JSON API, and put them on your own website, like I did: https://abhinavsarkar.net/microblog/ #Indieweb"

Building Blocks
IndieWeb Building Blocks that Mastodon supports:
 * h-card on comment markup in this patch
 * full h-feed, h-entry, h-card on user profiles and post permalinks in this patch later fixed in this patch. See also #122
 * rel-me is now support in this commit and that commit

rel-me support
Mastodon uses rel-me to support "verified" site links in a green box with a green checkmark next to the verified site.

https://joinmastodon.org/verification explains how the verification process works.




 * Washington Post ran into an issue with verification because Mastodon had a 1MB limit on pages it requested while verifying. An update was submitted that looks at the first megabyte instead of limiting the page to 1MB. A public debugger tool was set up as well.


 * Limitation with Twitter: https://mastodon.social/@Gargron/100749399047652462
 * "Link verification would work with Twitter profiles too since they have rel="me", but Twitter obfuscates links with t.co. I don't know how to deal with that, since resolving every href on the page to check for redirects doesn't seem viable." @Gargron September 18, 2018
 * rel-me testimonial: https://mastodon.social/@qubyte/100749428077603231
 * "@Gargron Nice. I already had a rel=me link to mastodon in the header of my blog, so this was free!" @qubyte September 18, 2018
 * rel-me for verified status advantage over Twitter: https://mastodon.social/@rickscully/100749623830777332
 * "@Gargron I added verified links. Thanks. Birdsite would never verify me despite owning my name domain and having been and active Internet user under my own name for decades." @rickscully September 19, 2018

To Be Proposed
These are ideas/suggestions for Mastodon to support more IndieWeb building blocks. Feel free to file individual issues for them in https://github.com/Gargron/mastodon/issues and then move them (and their issue link) to the Requests section below.
 * IndieAuth support (both sign-in with IndiAuth, and use of a Pleroma profile as an IndieAuth identity to sign-in elsewhere)
 * WebSub support. Given Mastodon's h-feed support, WebSub support would be great for realtime notifications of updates from Mastodon profiles.

IndieAuth Provider
Requested informally or as an aside. No formal issue filed (yet).

Requested on Twitter: https://twitter.com/Lady_Ada_King/status/1062518206345097216 by @Lady_Ada_King November 14, 2018: "'Indie Web Awesomeness: You can use to verify you own the sites in your mastodon profile! It would be really cool if you could use mastodon as an authentication provider for https://indieauth.com/'"

Also: https://aaronparecki.com/2018/11/13/10/ "Since Mastodon already supports OAuth 2, and all users already have a URL, adding IndieAuth to Mastodon would not be a huge leap."

It was also discussed in the following GitHub issue: https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/issues/4800

Micropub
If you can help add Micropub support to Mastodon, please contribute to:
 * Mastodon issue #2234: Micropub Support

Micropub in Mastodon support has been requested for multiple reasons on:
 * micro.blog: https://micro.blog/manton/1040840
 * "@nicktmro@mastodon.social @Gargron@mastodon.social I think Micropub in Mastodon is a great idea! It's a simple API (especially for posting) with support from a lot of different tools now." @manton November 13, 2018
 * an indieweb personal site: https://eddiehinkle.com/2018/11/13/20/reply/
 * "There are a bunch of great Micropub apps for the Web, iOS and Android so I definitely think it would be helpful to add Micropub support. "

Founder @Gargron noted Micropub support is “A lot simpler than ActivityPub C2S”:
 * https://mastodon.social/users/Gargron/statuses/101059803950665324
 * "@trwnh Micropub is a lot simpler than ActivityPub C2S" @Gargron November 12, 2018

Rejected
Please consider rejections as opportunities to listen for feedback on how to improve indieweb building blocks, and always respond politely. It's a good thing when people spend their own time to analyze these requests and provide their reasons for rejection.


 * 2018-04-03: Webmention sending support was surveyed (most were for it), but rejected (2018-04-03) for a set of privacy concerns that are worth addressing or at least having answers for. E.g. "It's a privacy violation that people aren't expecting", is no more true for sending Webmentions than sending referrer headers, or allowing search engine indexing — all of which could be gated on the same site/user preference.
 * 2017-04-21: Subscribe to Atom feeds directly
 * Update: "I do not plan on supporting Atom feeds that don't have Webfinger and Salmon (i.e. non-interactive, non-user feeds)"

If you want to re-request a rejected feature, please at a minimum:
 * document the list of specific reasons for rejection of a feature
 * somehow fix or address (via documentation etc.) the reasons for rejection, i.e. here on the wiki, or by updating the spec for the rejected feature.
 * wait some amount of time before re-requesting. case-by-case judgment call. i.e. if you're able to quickly address all the problems noted, follow-up with a thank you for the feedback and link to where you have addressed the problems. otherwise consider waiting at least a few months, perhaps even a year before re-requesting. In either case, make it very clear what changes have occurred that make the feature request worthy of reconsideration.

Current
See Mastodon Github Issues:
 * https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/issues

Resolved
Resolved or apparently resolved past issues.


 * Official blog is no longer dependent on Medium and is built on Hugo instead. https://github.com/mastodon/blog

One Primary Instance
Resolution: Apparently resolved as there is a growing number of Mastodon instances (and the "primary" instances is now closed to new signups). See:
 * https://instances.mastodon.xyz/
 * https://github.com/tootsuite/documentation/blob/master/Using-Mastodon/List-of-Mastodon-instances.md

Issue:

One danger, that projects like Mastodon face, is when they are used as a service by more than one user, any downtime will affect multiple users. For instance, on the morning of Nov 11, 2016 the mastodon.social instance was down briefly and.

In this regard, promoting "mastodon.social" the site in particular as an alternative to Twitter (e.g. see tweets encouraging "join me on mastodon.social") merely encourage users to go from one silo, to a perhaps more open source-based and more open standards supporting silo, yet still dependent on another central org.

As a contrast, if each user were to run their own Mastodon instance, one instance going down would not affect multiple users in this fashion. Second best would be if users who choose not to run on their own servers were instead encouraged get together with someone that does, which again, would limit the exposure of when one instance goes down. But when such users all join a single server (e.g. the mastodon.social site itself) or any platform with similar architecture, they will suffer from this single point of failure in design.

On the other hand, multi-user instances benefit from shared community oversight, in the form of having admins and moderators who (presumably) actively block known-hostile instances and users.

Update (and one way to resolve this!) As of 2017-04-04 (or earlier?) mastodon.social is no longer accepting sign-ups and directing people to sign-up elsewhere: https://mastodon.social/about

"'Due to exceptionally high traffic, registrations on this instance are closed until quality of service can be assured for existing users. Choose one of the various other public instances to sign up!'"

POSSE

 * Bridgy Publish supports POSSEing to Mastodon.
 * Feed2Toot is a python command-line tool to POSSE any RSS Feed to Mastodon.
 * uses the WordPress plugin Mastodon Autopost to POSSE posts from his site to Mastodon. (There is also a similar plugin called Mastodon Share that does roughly the same thing.) As of late 2019 he's getting backfeed from Mastodon posts via brid.gy.
 * also uses Daniel Nix's Known plugin Known Mastodon to syndicate to Mastodon since April 2017.
 * uses the WordPress plugin Mastodon auto share to POSSE posts as toots. Replies to the toots are not syndicated back to the original post given the current misgiving Mastodon developers have towards webmentions.
 * also uses the activity stream plugin,host meta-data plugin, oStatus plugin, salmon plugin, and the webfinger plugin by to create a fediverse instance of his own domain at jgmac1106@jgregorymcverry.com
 * also uses the WordPress plugin Mastodon Autopost to POSSE posts from his site to Mastodon.
 * Added a syndication target to allow syndicating to Mastodon when posting via Micropub (https://github.com/ngm/doublepress/blob/master/functions.php#L593).
 * All micro.blog hosted blogs or integrated feeds can POSSE to Mastodon by setting up cross-posting in their "Feeds & Cross-Posting" settings: https://micro.blog/account/feeds
 * uses Mastodon Autopost since August 2019.
 * uses the POSSE approach to publish short-form posts to Mastodon. They syndicate posts from their Kirby CMS interface with a custom-built hook function and checkbox field utilizing the mention-client-php to send Webmentions to brid.gy in the same method as used for publishing to Twitter.
 * uses the POSSE approach to selectively publish, edit (delete-and-redraft/repost), and delete notes on Mastodon from Django using Mastodon.py since July 2022.
 * Nicolas Hoizey wrote Any Feed to Mastodon (GitHub Action) to POSSE to Mastodon from a JSON Feed

Federating Directly with Mastodon
Some in the IndieWeb community are working on bridging the gap between the Fediverse and the IndieWeb efforts, some of these include Advanced plugins/extensions/software which shouldn't require a Mastodon account on an instance as they make your site behave like a standalone instance of Mastodon:
 * has released Bridgy Fed which allows one to let their own website federate directly into Mastodon and other networks in various ways. Released in October 2017, it's still under development.
 * has a WordPress OStatus plugin which supports a variety of post kinds on Mastodon; it includes a handful of sub-plugins (Webfinger, Salmon, Activity Streams, etc.) to get everything working. Some of the pieces are out of date in October 2017, but are being upgraded over time.
 * is using 's ActivityPub plugin and NodeInfo plugin to make his WordPress website https://boffosocko.com to appear as an ActivityPub instance that can be followed on Mastodon at @chrisaldrich@boffosocko.com. Broad details for setting this up on WordPress can be found in the plugins or in this post: https://boffosocko.com/2022/04/25/55804148/#comment-374484
 * implemented the bare minimum of the ActivityPub spec to be able to comment on Mastodon posts and receive comments, as well as to be able to be followed by Mastodon users. To follow Mastodon users, he follows their profile pages which contain Microformats markup. To receive comments, incoming "Inbox" notifications are discarded and are forwarded on via Webmention instead, which works since Mastodon permalinks contain good Microformats for parsing the reply.
 * Lewis Dale has written a post on how they used Eleventy and Netlify to use their personal website as a Mastodon account: Be Friends with my Blog
 * All micro.blog hosted blogs with a custom domain can set up a Mastodon-compatible ActivityPub feed in their account settings, so that Mastodon users can follow and interact with them: https://micro.blog/account

Tools

 * https://instances.social/ This tool guides you through finding a Mastodon instance if you're not sure where to start.
 * http://www.unmung.com/mastoview Mastoview tool for seeing content from random instance
 * http://tooter.today This tool makes it easy to find a Mastodon instance if you're not sure where to start. (seems to not function as of 2018-04-08)
 * discovery service for people and topics: https://fediverse.info/explore/people
 * For potentially choosing an instance based on location, this map shows Mastodon servers that are are open for registration and serve specific regions or cities: https://umap.openstreetmap.fr/en/map/mastodon-near-me_828094#3/38.00/-88.95; To add your server, see repo at https://github.com/jazmichaelking/mastodon-near-me
 * Simplified Federation: a Firefox browser extension that automates part of the process of following new accounts across instances.

Praise

 * https://twitter.com/Discardia/status/1028466116715143168
 * "Letting go of what doesn’t give you what you want and upgrading are core principles of Discardia. There are many things I like about Twitter, but I find that all those things are available without the stuff I dislike on Mastodon.  I’l keep a Twitter presence on both, for now." @Discardia August 12, 2018
 * https://twitter.com/joinmastodon/status/1443418665471381509
 * "Mastodon, your cryptocurrency-free decentralized social network. No blockchains, no NFTs, no attempting to turn every social interaction into a microtransaction" @joinmastodon September 30, 2021
 * reasons https://todon.nl/@Galdrakinn/101234887962339702
 * "Reasons to join mastodon:- No ‘influencers’- Chronological timeline- New mates- Accessibility features - CW etiquette - Without the pressure of trying to please an audience via an algorithm to go viral, your shit-posting skills blossom into beautiful levels, shapes and colours that you didn’t know that you had in you.- Horny on main" @Galdrakinn December 13, 2018

Challenges picking an instance

 * Choosing a particular instance can not only be difficult, but finding one that will have some longevity and treat its users' data respectfully can be spotty.
 * As of 2019-02-23 From the 2017-04-15 Mashable article "Mastodon has an instance for Everyone" only 3 of the 9 Mastodon instances it links to are still up or actually still Mastodon (others are spam, random WordPress, or NSFW squatters)
 * Criticism: Server picking usability / UX: https://twitter.com/ashtonpittman/status/1588251480553062401
 * "Trying to sign up for Mastodon but I don't even know what to do once I hit this screen." @ashtonpittman November 3, 2022
 * Criticism: jargon in onboarding: https://mastodon.ie/@Ciaraioch/109287818715515862
 * ^ https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FgwPdUSWAAIsauL.jpg

User experience

 * Criticism: unclear homepage https://twitter.com/imdsm/status/1204795646080892928
 * "I feel as though from spending a few minutes on the http://joinmastodon.org website, it's just not super clear how it works or why I'd use it. I'm not sure if it's the dark mode, or the verbose-yet-detail sparse video, or the confusing navigation to apps. (1/n)" @imdsm December 11, 2019


 * Indieweb vs. Fediverse — discussing many of the UX issues with actually interacting and publishing within the Fediverse (meaning Mastodon and Pleroma, mostly)


 * Quit: https://twitter.com/hex/status/1519288739750715397
 * "After sleeping on it, obliterated my Mastodon account. Absolutely don't have time in my life for such an enormously retrograde step." @hex April 27, 2022

Lack of privacy

 * 2018-08-17 Criticism: DM/PM lack of privacy/encryption: https://mastodon.social/@thomasfuchs/100565509145298900
 * "Just as a heads-up, don’t use PMs/DMs on Mastodon, and if you have to never share any private information.Admins of sending and receiving instances can read those, as there is no end-to-end encryption. Even if you trust the admins, instance ownership could change or hackers or government could get in. Use different tools designed specifically for this." @thomasfuchs August 17, 2018


 * 2018-08-16 Criticisms (tweetstorm): https://twitter.com/adrienneleigh/status/1030213888850030592 (|archived)
 * "THREAD: In light of so many folks moving to Mastodon/the Fediverse, i want to re-up a couple of threads i did last year about safety and other issues. None of these have gone away, and the increased volume is gonna make them worse, not better." @adrienneleigh August 16, 2018
 * 2018-03-25 Privacy, centralization, trust, and: https://twitter.com/SarahJamieLewis/status/978057959686078464
 * "Twitter, let's talk about decentralization and federation and trust and why movements towards federated systems like Mastadon are maybe not where we want to be throwing effort and adoption drives behind if the end goal is privacy-preserving infrastructure." @SarahJamieLewis March 25, 2018

Lack of control

 * Criticism: “sign up on this stranger's server” is not really decentralized: https://twitter.com/lightcoin/status/1214293923922874369
 * "not a big fan of Mastodon. imo if a decentralized digital media app's first step is "sign up on this stranger's server" it's not good enough, and over time will probably look like email at best." @lightcoin January 6, 2020
 * ^^^ additionally: https://twitter.com/lightcoin/status/1214300933200515073
 * "indeed email has survived but if you run your own server people might never get your emails. it's already getting like that with Mastodon (as your suggestion to avoid http://madtodon.social shows). that's simply not an architecture I can invest energy into/ converting others to." @lightcoin January 6, 2020
 * Criticism: users vulnerable to whims of the instance admin: https://twitter.com/widdr/status/1541874233440993280
 * "mastodon federation was a disaster honestly; lacking any means to locate or verify your profile and posts other than the exact instance you went with, every single user was entirely vulnerable to the whims of the shard owner unless they ran their own" @widdr June 28, 2022

Admintax

 * Thread: https://twitter.com/rahaeli/status/1036304096280621063
 * "This is why I believe federated social networks are never going to work out long term. Someone who starts an instance doesn't know they're signing up for thousands of hours a year wading through the cloaca of the internet. That shit is *terrible* for you." @rahaeli September 2, 2018


 * https://twitter.com/andrewducker/status/1036188250124083200
 * "Mastodon and the challenges of abuse in a federated system https://nolanlawson.com/2018/08/31/mastodon-and-the-challenges-of-abuse-in-a-federated-system/" @andrewducker September 2, 2018


 * Another example of overwhelming admintax: https://toot.cafe/@nolan/109308154906981035
 * "Right now I'm exhausted and trying to figure out what to do next. I am heavily tempted to pull a mastodon.technology (https://ashfurrow.com/blog/mastodon-technology-shutdown/), but on the other hand I do still have a lot of sympathy for Mastodon, and I'm encouraged to see that it's finally getting the recognition I think it deserved years ago, back when this Elon mess was just a hypothetical possibility. Also, many folks on toot.cafe are people I consider friends, and so I don't want to leave them in the lurch." @nolan November 8, 2022

Community dynamics

 * Criticism: 2018-06-04 I left Mastodon yesterday / Or, the Unfortunately Long Story of Another Badly-Managed Open Source Project that Pushes People Away
 * Follow-up: 2018-06-30 I left Mastodon 27 days ago / A follow-up to “I left Mastodon yesterday”


 * Criticism: threads: https://twitter.com/NotE0157H7/status/1347998362465832960
 * "Some bullshit went down last night that really reaffirms my stance that the fediverse and Mastodon is mostly a model of what to not do at this point." @NotE0157H7 January 9, 2021

Doesn't fix core problems of twitter

 * Comparison with Twitter, some issues noted, thread: https://twitter.com/xkeepah/status/1511468733746737152
 * ""elon is part of twitter now, time to move to mastodon" - mastodon has all of the same problems twitter does except for celebrities - it also has its own additional fun problems  you will probably hang around mastodon for a few weeks, get bored, and either come back or leave" @xkeepah April 5, 2022
 * Distributed toxicity and the IndieWeb: discussion about how the timeline- and quick-response nature of Twitter is what leads to the toxicity on the platform, and how Mastodon doesn't really fix any of that

Other concerns

 * 2018-08-16 Criticism: apparent non-priority of losing followers problem: https://edolas.world/objects/97a71361-7ca9-4b93-8c82-ee4efcce921a
 * "@frankmeeuwsen @benwerd It's completely possible, just not with Mastodon's current architecture. There's a long thread about it on the GitHub issue tracker. The gist is it would require a large change and even if the changes were made, it would be difficult to migrate existing instances.  I think it would be straightforward to design/implement this transition, especially since it's basically a solved problem. But the lead dev is more interested in his other ideas than this feature. :blobcry:" @0x1C3B00DA August 16, 2018
 * Criticism: https://twitter.com/retornam/status/1150852938786467840
 * "Mastodon etc don’t work because the network isn’t there. For example I love Signal but all my friends prefer WhatsApp so I’m forced to stay there." @retornam July 15, 2019


 * Criticism: rebuilds feudalism: https://twitter.com/swardley/status/1587866413947043847
 * "Me : Whereas Mastodon ... well ... why do tech people keep on trying to rebuild feudalism? It would be quite nice that when you join a server, rather than username they just say "serf" and someone tells you who the nobility of that little kingdom is." @swardley November 2, 2022

Downtime
On 2016-05-02 at 7:05 am IST.


 * https://twitter.com/nelson/status/1517152425760546820
 * "My Mastodon instance has been down for two months. I finally accept it's gone. One hidden cost of federation; a lot more partial points of failure. Not sure if I'm going to bother setting up a new account. Mastodon is pretty good tech and a nice community but isolated." @nelson April 21, 2022

Articles

 * https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/mastodon-is-like-twitter-without-nazis-so-why-are-we-not-using-it
 * https://robek.world/featured/what-is-gnu-social-and-is-mastodon-social-a-twitter-clone/
 * http://mashable.com/2017/04/05/mastodon-wont-survive/
 * http://boffosocko.com/2017/04/05/mastodon-social-isnt-as-federated-or-as-decentralized-as-the-indie-web/
 * 2017-08-01 M for Mastodon: A new logo and v1.5
 * 2020-05-22 Fediverse, or a double-edged sword

Instances

 * indieweb.me - an Instance for French-speaking IndieWeb users
 * IndieWeb.social an Instance for IndieWeb interested users (see also https://jeannie.digital/62/)
 * EU has an official mastodon node for EU bodies to post to. It looks like many posts are [PESATAS] from twitter https://social.network.europa.eu/about
 * CounterSocial
 * https://mnm.social (Redirects to unrelated site as of 2020-02-03)