Mastodon

Your self-hosted, globally interconnected microblogging community (by mastodon)

Mastodon Alternatives

Similar projects and alternatives to Mastodon

NOTE: The number of mentions on this list indicates mentions on common posts plus user suggested alternatives. Hence, a higher number means a better Mastodon alternative or higher similarity.

Mastodon reviews and mentions

Posts with mentions or reviews of Mastodon. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-09-11.
  • Social bookmarks in the Fediverse
    3 projects | dev.to | 11 Sep 2023
    I'm very active across a range of sites and services that are analogous to those you might be familiar with. On Mastodon, for instance, I currently do some work with Mastodon gGmbH, the non-profit behind the project and host of two of the larger service instances; and although my original account was on one of those instances, at the end of last year I moved my account (taking the related network of connections with me) to a much smaller server run by a former coworker, mostly populated by other former coworkers, but I'm still connected with users across the rest of the Fediverse.
  • How do I find more niche, smaller mastodon servers?
    2 projects | /r/Mastodon | 28 Aug 2023
    I’m looking for a small server, with a few hundred people at most. A lot of these servers aren’t on joinmastodon.org, is there a way to find smaller servers like this?
  • Splitting the Web
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 1 Aug 2023
    The awful thing about Mastodon is it used to serve plain HTML but this behavior was removed.

    https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/19953

  • What Happened to Vivaldi Social?
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 29 Jul 2023
    One of the linked fixes is: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/commit/13ec425b721c9594...

    It seems like it was trivial to make it happen atomically.

    There just wasn't a need to before since them not being atomic isn't an issue, unless you have a poor configuration like someone pointing sidekiq at a stale database server (sorry, a replica), which I see as the primary issue here.

    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 29 Jul 2023
    > the account merge code could have been narrowly scoped

    IMO automated merging/deduplication of "similar" records is one of those incredibly hard problems, with edge cases and race conditions galore, that should have a human in the loop whenever possible, and should pass data (especially data consumed asynchronously) as explicitly as possible, with numerous checks to ensure that facts haven't shifted on the ground.

    Looking at the Mastodon source [0], and seeing that there's not even an explicit list of to-merge-from IDs passed from the initiator of the merge request to the asynchronous executor of the merge logic, it seems like it was only a matter of time before something like this happened.

    This is not a criticism of Mastodon, by the way! I've personally written, and been bitten by, merge logic with far worse race conditions, and it's frankly incredible that a feature like this even exists for a volunteer project! But it is a cautionary tale nonetheless.

    [0] https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/blob/main/app/workers/a... (note: AGPL)

    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 29 Jul 2023
    This is the case, more or less. The fix for this issue boiled down to a one-liner: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/commit/13ec425b721c9594...

    But basically, some object attributes (which should have been set by default) weren't set by default. This is a common oversight when dealing with data structures that are incomplete at one point or another, and it's easy to assume during programming that code will execute in a fixed order that allows for the necessary fields to be present when needed although sometimes it doesn't always work out that way.

    In my opinion, they were lucky to have caught this but a fix should include more than adding missing initialization. They should implement a sanity check to ensure that fields used are present and !NULL, and if things are undefined or missing for whatever reason, abort whatever process they are attempting to perform and log the issue.

  • Threads
    4 projects | /r/comics | 7 Jul 2023
    You do though? If you go to joinmastodon.org and click "create account" you get a list of servers to pick from. Once you select one you just create an account as on any other website.
    4 projects | /r/comics | 7 Jul 2023
  • Bluesky partners with Namecheap to power domains as usernames
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 6 Jul 2023
    Lot of negative comments here but IMO this is huge. The best way to keep anything commercial good in the long term is competition, and the only way to have competition with web services is portability, which requires a portable identity/username and open protocols. Bluesky is currently the only platform offering both in a convenient package. Even Mastodon doesn't make it this easy[0].

    [0]: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/2668

    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 6 Jul 2023
    Mastodon could have done this (via SRV records, like everyone else), but chose not to for reasons unclear to me: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/1931 So if you want to own your Mastodon identity as a domain, you must also maintain a Webfinger server to act as a redirect.
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    blog.mergify.com | 21 Sep 2023
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Stats

Basic Mastodon repo stats
1199
43,964
9.9
about 12 hours ago

mastodon/mastodon is an open source project licensed under GNU Affero General Public License v3.0 which is an OSI approved license.

Mastodon is marked as "self-hosted". This means that it can be used as a standalone application on its own.

The primary programming language of Mastodon is Ruby.

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