Software Spotlight: Mastodon

Nottingham Nerds -

Welcome back to another post, nerds! We are here today to discuss social networking. Nottingham Nerds generally takes a pretty strong stance against social networks and the companies that run them because of the data collection, lack of privacy, manipulation, security issues, rampant misinformation, and many other reasons.

We ran across Mastodon a while back and have been doing some research on the service to see whether it was just another social network that had plans for all of the typical bad things that social networks do, or if this one was different. From the outside in, it looks very similar to Twitter in it's small 500-word + 1 photo limits on posts, but is different in many other ways. Generally speaking we like to use the phrase:

If you aren't paying for the product, you are the product

While this phrase is obviously true for most social networks and phone apps, it's quite the opposite when used in the context of well developed, well audited open-source software – and yes – Mastodon is open-source (code here) which we were very pleased to find out. We also found out that Mastodon is a federated service; this means that essentially anyone can spin up a server running the Mastodon service and add it to a list of servers for people to join, and users from any server can follow and be followed by anyone from any other server (and you can migrate between servers too!). Open-Source and Federation are important for a few reasons:

  • No single entity owns the servers that run the Mastodon service and therefore no single entity controls whether the service continues or dies
  • Mastodon is not a single website like other social media platforms – it's a network of communities owned by individuals and organizations
  • The community can build up its own set of servers regardless if whether Mastodon ceases to exist
  • There are no ads and the service is free to use – Mastodon has no incentive to sell you anything
  • The code can be audited and verified by anyone at any time
  • The code can be forked into an entirely new, community driven project if Mastodon starts to make changes that the community disagrees with

Mastodon also comes with very effective anti-abuse tools and lots of moderators (more people own servers so more moderation can occur from multiple sources), and many communities have strict codes of conduct. Lastly, you can view posts from only your home server or from any server on the fediverse! How awesome is that? Go check them out.