basics of Mastodon

Mastodon is a microblogging service, similar in some ways to Twitter, but with some key differences:

it has a 500-character limit it’s not controlled by a for-profit company anybody can run their own version of it, and still talk to everyone else

Point 3 gets at the bit that people tend to find confusing. Some simple comparisons that we can draw are email and telephones: your email might be from Apple, your employer, Protonmail or somebody else, and your telephone might be managed by O2, T-Mobile, or somebody else.

Behind the scenes, those services all federate with¹ each other. Email does by looking up the email domain² and then having that email service route³ from there to the addressee⁴. I don’t know how telephones do it.

Mastodon also federates. Imagine if I could run a Twitter account on my own domain⁵, example.com — I would then be known as @rowan@example.com, and you could follow me from your account on twitter.com.

So now, we’re starting to envision a democratic system. Everybody has a choice about where to put their social presence, and can still follow their friends no matter where they are — same as you can visit any website from any internet service provider, web browser, location.⁶

Mastodon takes this utopian internet vision and puts it into practice. From my account on toot.cafe I can follow my friend @ebeth on witches.town, or @shel on cybre.space, or anybody else using Mastodon.