What is Mastodon? The decentralized social network from my perspective

“People are moving to Mastodon!”, a coworker said to me while we were eating lunch. “Look”, he continued, holding out his phone to show me the application already running. “It’s very similar to Twitter”. When I asked him why he didn't just use Twitter instead of Mastodon, he told me it was because "Mastodon doesn't have ads, and it’s decentralized social network”.

I initially heard about Mastodon at that point. It was early 2022, and I didn't really pay much attention to it until later that year, during the whole drama with Twitter and Elon Musk, and the mighty exodus from Twitter.

I joined the biggest instance when I originally made an account, but after using the application for a while, I discovered that there were many more instances. I was genuinely puzzled by this. Also, the fact that I was receiving several fresh posts in the feed in various languages made the entire application experience for me strange. The worst part was that I had no interest in most of the posts in that feed. However, there was something about the whole concept that compelled me to learn more about it and to start reading about it.

What is Mastodon?

Mastodon is a free, decentralized, and open-source software that allows users to set up servers to communicate with each other. It’s built on a protocol called ActivityPub.

If you are a developer, or someone whose work is tech-related, most probably you will understand this definition.

For the others, I realize that’s a lot, so let me explain:

It's decentralized, as we've already stated. This means the servers are distributed and self-hosted by volunteers rather than "siloed" and owned by one entity. There are servers for Twitter all throughout the world, but they are all owned by Twitter. With Mastodon, that's not the case. The servers are owned by many small entities - that can be individuals or certain organizations.

Still unclear? It's actually more like email than anything else you've probably used.

When you first create your account, you choose a server — similar to how you choose to open an email account on Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo, or wherever — which generates your profile’s address. So, for example, if you sign up for Mastodon via the Web Performance server, then your address will be @[your username]@webperf.social. But no matter which server you sign up with, you will be able to communicate with users from any other server, e.g. you can easily follow someone that has an account at mastodon.social server with profile address @[username]@mastodon.social, just like how Gmail users email Outlook users and vice versa.

The only difference is the communication protocol - Mastodon uses ActivityPub and email uses SMTP. And guess what? You don't need to know any of that to use them.

Was this explanation still technical? Are you still confused about what is Mastodon?

Mastodon servers can also be thought of as towns, with each server representing a town. Which town (server) you dwell in is entirely up to you. However, whichever town you choose, you can still talk to people in other cities through the internet. And if you decide you don't like the town you're in, you can relocate.

How to find a server on Mastodon?

We already mentioned that in order to create your account, you need to choose a server. You can run your own server, but you don’t have to - most people don't run their own servers. There are tons of servers already available, which are run entirely by volunteers.

In my opinion, it's better to be on a smaller server, and that server should be about something you care about. I am personally on a server for web performance and web technologies. If you don’t have any interest in that, you can check more servers here. Also don’t forget, it's relatively painless to move to a new server. Far less difficult than relocating to a new town.