Mastodon is a free, open-source social network server based on open web protocols like ActivityPub and OStatus. The social focus of the project is a viable decentralized alternative to commercial social media silos that returns the control of the content distribution channels to the people. The technical focus of the project is a good user interface, a clean REST API for 3rd party apps and robust anti-abuse tools.

Click on the screenshot below to watch a demo of the UI:

Ruby on Rails is used for the back-end, while React.js and Redux are used for the dynamic front-end. A static front-end for public resources (profiles and statuses) is also provided.

If you would like, you can support the development of this project on Patreon or Liberapay. Alternatively, you can donate to this BTC address: 17j2g7vpgHhLuXhN4bueZFCvdxxieyRVWd

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Resources

• Frequently Asked Questions
• Use this tool to find Twitter friends on Mastodon
• API overview
• List of Mastodon instances
• List of apps
• List of sponsors

Features

No vendor lock-in: Fully interoperable with any conforming platform

It doesn’t have to be Mastodon, whatever implements ActivityPub or OStatus is part of the social network!

Real-time timeline updates

See the updates of people you’re following appear in real-time in the UI via WebSockets. There’s a firehose view as well!

Federated thread resolving

If someone you follow replies to a user unknown to the server, the server fetches the full thread so you can view it without leaving the UI

Media attachments like images and short videos

Upload and view images and WebM/MP4 videos attached to the updates. Videos with no audio track are treated like GIFs; normal videos are looped - like vines!

OAuth2 and a straightforward REST API

Mastodon acts as an OAuth2 provider so 3rd party apps can use the API

Fast response times

Mastodon tries to be as fast and responsive as possible, so all long-running tasks are delegated to background processing

Deployable via Docker

You don’t need to mess with dependencies and configuration if you want to try Mastodon, if you have Docker and Docker Compose the deployment is extremely easy

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Development

Please follow the development guide from the documentation repository.

Deployment

There are guides in the documentation repository for deploying on various platforms.

Contributing

You can open issues for bugs you’ve found or features you think are missing. You can also submit pull requests to this repository. Here are the guidelines for code contributions

IRC channel: #mastodon on irc.freenode.net

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Extra credits

The elephant friend illustrations are created by Dopatwo