Mastodon

Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It

by Cory Doctorow  · 6 Oct 2025  · 313pp  · 94,415 words

their users’ painless departure would be extremely easy to administer, without any of the fact-intensiveness that makes anti-harassment rules so cumbersome. Mastodon, for instance, is a federated alternative to Twitter and Facebook. Signing up for a Mastodon server yields a familiar experience: you follow the people you want to hear

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in to just a few feeds. You can exchange direct messages with others and post your own words, pictures, and videos. The thing that makes Mastodon federated is that there are lots of Mastodon servers, with all kinds of management structures: some are co-ops, some are nonprofits, some are run by

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hobbyists, and some are run by businesses. Meta’s Threads is a Mastodon server, and Truth Social, Donald Trump’s social media platform, is also a Mastodon server (more on this in a moment). By default, Mastodon servers are designed to exchange messages

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’s my personal domain—it’s a long story.) In the same way, you can sign up for one of the big Mastodon servers like mastodon.social (a server run by the nonprofit, open-source group that maintains the code for Mastodon) and follow me (on mamot.fr, a server run by

Everything for Everyone: The Radical Tradition That Is Shaping the Next Economy

by Nathan Schneider  · 10 Sep 2018  · 326pp  · 91,559 words

to Twitter. Social.coop, as the domain suggested, was a cooperative managed by its users. Rather than being controlled by any one company, a federated social network like Mastodon is made up of interconnected nodes; users choose which node to trust with their data, and through the network they can interact with users

How to Do Nothing

by Jenny Odell  · 8 Apr 2019  · 243pp  · 76,686 words

not only for users to own their own data, but to shift that data and software closer to their end points of use. Mastodon, for example, is a federated social network of “instances,” each using free software on a community-run server whose users can nonetheless communicate with those in other instances

Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter

by Kate Conger and Ryan Mac  · 17 Sep 2024

company not only banned @ElonJet, but other accounts that shared links to other sites with public flight data. That included the Twitter account for Mastodon, a competing social network that shared that people could find the @ElonJet account on their site, as well as more than half a dozen journalists at The

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remove accounts created solely for the purpose of promoting other social platforms and content that contains links or usernames for the following platforms: Facebook, Instagram, Mastodon, Truth Social, Tribe, Nostr and Post,” the company announced on one of its official feeds. Musk had demanded the policy in an attempt to preserve traffic

Stories Are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind

by Annalee Newitz  · 3 Jun 2024  · 251pp  · 68,713 words

on with former Twitter addicts who left the platform in the wake of Elon Musk’s takeover in late 2022. Many moved their accounts to Mastodon, a social media platform with some of the same features as Twitter but where posts don’t circulate as quickly. There are a few technical reasons

Battle for the Bird: Jack Dorsey, Elon Musk, and the $44 Billion Fight for Twitter's Soul

by Kurt Wagner  · 20 Feb 2024  · 332pp  · 127,754 words

master at baiting?” he posted, presumably drawing giggles from any teenage boys who followed his account. In another tweet he included a screenshot of Mastodon, a new competing social network that was having some technical issues, and wrote, “If you don’t like Twitter anymore, there is awesome site called Masterbatedon.” Either

Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language

by Gretchen McCulloch  · 22 Jul 2019  · 413pp  · 106,479 words

place to tap into a global community rather than reinforce a local one. (In the late 2010s, many of them started contemplating switching to Mastodon, a social networking platform with a decentralized, topic-based structure and a lack of user-friendliness which both recalled the early internet.) As the internet’s role

Ways of Being: Beyond Human Intelligence

by James Bridle  · 6 Apr 2022  · 502pp  · 132,062 words

recommend Cory Doctorow, Walkaway (New York: Macmillan, 2017). For examples of distributed processing initiatives, see https://setiathome.berkeley.edu and https://foldingathome.org/. The social networks Mastodon and Scuttlebutt, the Beaker web browser and Jitsi.org web conferencing are good examples of federated and peer-to-peer network projects. 35. For a