A deep dive into Mastodon
Elephant in the Room
Get started with free microblogging, interact with others who share you interests, and even help expand the Fediverse with your own Mastodon instance.
Recent affairs at Twitter have led to resounding and sudden success for the free, open, and federated Mastodon [1] social media platform. But despite the apparent benefit of Twitter's mismanagement, Mastodon's success was bound to happen sometime. As Cory Doctorow explains in one of his many eye-opening essays [2], proprietary, centralized, and for-profit social media platforms always kill themselves. Mastodon and other open platforms will fill in the vacuum they leave in their wake.
Mastodon Is Not Twitter
Thinking of Mastodon as a stand-in for Twitter will leave newcomers confused. Sure, on the surface, Mastodon is a microblogging social media platform, and you could use it a such. But, as Max Leibman points out, assuming that Mastodon is just like Twitter is the first of the two fundamental errors people make.
Mastodon taps into and inherits all the advantages of the Fediverse. It is not only distributed, but massively distributed. This means no controlling entity can mess with your content or push sponsored posts onto your feed. Although a company can buy up individual servers, it will be hard for Mastodon, as an ever-expanding network of interconnected, but independent instances, to be bought out.
[...]
Buy this article as PDF
(incl. VAT)
Buy Linux Magazine
US / Canada
UK / Australia
Subscribe to our Linux Newsletters
Find Linux and Open Source Jobs
Subscribe to our ADMIN Newsletters
Support Our Work
Linux Magazine content is made possible with support from readers like you. Please consider contributing when you’ve found an article to be beneficial.
News
-
Linux Kernel 6.17 is Available
Linus Torvalds has announced that the latest kernel has been released with plenty of core improvements and even more hardware support.
-
Kali Linux 2025.3 Released with New Hacking Tools
If you're a Kali Linux fan, you'll be glad to know that the third release of this famous pen-testing distribution is now available with updates for key components.
-
Zorin OS 18 Beta Available for Testing
The latest release from the team behind Zorin OS is ready for public testing, and it includes plenty of improvements to make it more powerful, user-friendly, and productive.
-
Fedora Linux 43 Beta Now Available for Testing
Fedora Linux 43 Beta ships with Gnome 49 and KDE Plasma 6.4 (and other goodies).
-
USB4 Maintainer Leaves Intel
Michael Jamet, one of the primary maintainers of USB4 and Thunderbolt drivers, has left Intel, leaving a gaping hole for the Linux community to deal with.
-
Budgie 10.9.3 Now Available
The latest version of this elegant and configurable Linux desktop aligns with changes in Gnome 49.
-
KDE Linux Alpha Available for Daring Users
It's official, KDE Linux has arrived, but it's not quite ready for prime time.
-
AMD Initiates Graphics Driver Updates for Linux Kernel 6.18
This new AMD update focuses on power management, display handling, and hardware support for Radeon GPUs.
-
AerynOS Alpha Release Available
With a choice of several desktop environments, AerynOS 2025.08 is almost ready to be your next operating system.
-
AUR Repository Still Under DDoS Attack
Arch User Repository continues to be under a DDoS attack that has been going on for more than two weeks.