Tutorial – Mastodon

Tutorial – Mastodon

Article from Issue 228/2019
Author(s):

The open and simple Mastodon API makes it easy to create applications to interact with this federated microblogging platform. Here are some of the clients that the community has come up with and how you can use them.

Last issue [1], I introduced the Fediverse [2] and, in particular, what is becoming the rising star in the federated universe: Mastodon [3]. Mastodon, a microblogging platform á la Twitter, is succeeding because it is simple to use, while at the same time packed with features. It comes with none of the shady shenanigans proprietary platforms inflict upon their users, and it looks slick, cool, and attractive.

Thanks to Mastodon's open and simple API, you can easily write scripts to interact with your account. This has led to a whole gaggle of web clients, desktop and mobile apps, and command-line tools for Mastodon.

Web Clients

To begin with, there is Mastodon's own default web interface. Your first interaction with Mastodon is probably going to be through this. It comes with a lot of features, so many that I dedicated a large chunk of last month's article to explaining all of Mastodon's ins and outs. That said, there are more web clients out there.

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