Mastodon – Into the Fediverse

When I first joined Twitter, I remember the excitement and intrigue over this new platform, using great third-party apps and having intelligent conversations with people. Sadly, those days look like they have already, or are soon going to be, gone and lots of people are looking for a new place for their social interactions.

Enter Mastodon, an open-source social platform powered by ActivityPub and part of the wider Fediverse. My guest this week is James Smith, an open-source developer who also happens to run the Mastodon instance I joined in the last week or so.

We chat about what precisely the Fediverse is, looking back at the early days of the internet for some context, as well as going fairly deep into the what, why, and how of Mastodon. James also shares the story of what happened to his server during the rapid ‘abandon ship’ style departure from the bird site and how one high-profile member meant a quadrupling of server costs!

One thing to be very upfront about, Jae and I have pretty much decided we won’t be active on Twitter. However, because we don’t want to cut off our amazing listeners who are still on the bird powered platform, our Twitter account is staying put, as well as our new home on Mastodon, which because of the nature of the platform means we have more scope in terms of content.

Have you jumped into the Fediverse yet, or is something holding you back? If you have comments, or have some questions about Mastodon and need some help, we’d love hear from you, so send a note over to [email protected], leave a comment on the post, or start a discussion in Goodpods.

If you liked this episode or any of our content, we’d greatly appreciate any little bit of support you can throw our way over at our Ko-Fi page.

Episode Links

• James Bilsbrough on Mastodon
• James Smith on Mastodon
• Crossed Wires on Mastodon
• Join Mastodon
• Fediverse
• Pixelfed
• Funkwhale
• PeerTube
• Fedifinder - Find your Twitter contacts on Mastodon
• Debirdify - Another way to find Twitter contacts.

Chapter Times

1. 00:00:04: Introductions
2. 00:04:01: The Fediverse & ActivityPub
3. 00:11:50: What Is Mastodon?
4. 00:14:25: Mastodon Features
5. 00:19:46: No Ads
6. 00:21:51: Content Promotion, Rules, Timelines
7. 00:26:59: Filtering The Fediverse
8. 00:33:02: Equal Apportunities
9. 00:37:03: The Deluge Of New Users
10. 00:45:46: Server Architecture
11. 00:47:34: Self-Hosting & Federation
12. 00:51:33: More Than Just Mastodon
13. 01:01:23: Wrapping Up

Credits

Intro and outro theme: Ace of Clubs by RoccoW