Mastodon is a free, open-source social network server. A decentralized solution to commercial platforms, it avoids the risks of a single company monopolizing your communication. Anyone can run Mastodon and participate in the social network seamlessly.

An alternative implementation of the GNU social project. Based on ActivityStreams, Webfinger, WebSub and Salmon.

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

The project focus is a clean REST API and a good user interface. 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. Alternatively, you can donate to this BTC address: 17j2g7vpgHhLuXhN4bueZFCvdxxieyRVWd

Resources

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

Features

• Fully interoperable with GNU social and any OStatus platform Whatever implements Atom feeds, ActivityStreams, Salmon, WebSub and Webfinger is part of the network
• Real-time timeline updates See the updates of people you’re following appear in real-time in the UI via WebSockets
• 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 WebM Upload and view images and WebM videos attached to the updates
• OAuth2 and a straightforward REST API Mastodon acts as an OAuth2 provider so 3rd party apps can use the API, which is RESTful and simple
• Background processing for long-running tasks Mastodon tries to be as fast and responsive as possible, so all long-running tasks that can be delegated to background processing, are
• 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

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

Extra credits

• The Emoji One pack has been used for the emojis
• The error page image courtesy of Dopatwo