More tusk than musk – a Mastodon FAQ

What is Mastodon? Mastodon is an alternative social media system comprising lots of different interconnected sites, each with its own specific interests, but all running the open-source Mastodon software, which makes them all function in roughly the same way and allows communication and sharing between users. When was it started? Mastodon was started in March 2016, but gained a lot of new interest in April 2022 and again in November 2022 in the wake of major changes at one of the more well-known social media systems, Twitter. Technically, how is Mastodon different? First off, Mastodon is not a single service in the way that Twitter and most other social media tools are. You’ll have heard the word instance and server bandied about with reference to Mastodon recently. That’s the jargon. Each instance is really just a separate website with its own domain name. The one I’m on is Mastodon Social, its address is https://mastodon.social. Why do the different instances look the same? The thing about all these instances, these websites, with odd-looking addresses is that they all run the same software, the mastodon software, so they have the same look and layout and make the same tools available to users. Superficially, this sounds a bit like Facebook Groups, but you can think of Mastodon as being more akin to hundreds of self-hosted WordPress blogs with multiple bloggers/authors/users/admins. What’s that word, fediverse, mean? The Mastodon creators call the ne...
Source: David Bradley Sciencebase - Songs, Snaps, Science - Category: Science Authors: Tags: Social Media Source Type: blogs