Updates from the Mastodon team
Adding sign-up to your Mastodon app
Since Mastodon 2.7, it is actually possible to let users sign up through your app, instead of asking them to go to a Mastodon website directly and then return. Let’s go over how this can be done.
Eugen Rochko
CEO / Founder
Mastodon 3.0 in-depth
Detailed notes on REST API changes, new deployment options, new admin settings and how to use them
Eugen Rochko
CEO / Founder
How to migrate from one server to another
With the sad news that KNZK was shutting down we thought it might be useful for people to have a refresher on the features that Mastodon has built in that make moving instances easy and painless. Backing up Your Data Data export If you are moving to a new instance the first thing you will want to do is to get a backup of all of your data. Thankfully this process is painless with the Data Export tab under the “Import and Export” page. Here you can download your followers list, your muted users list and your blocked users list.
Eleanor
Guest
Mastodon now available on DigitalOcean
We have published a 1-click install image on DigitalOcean. This reduces the initial time investment in self-hosting Mastodon substantially. You create a new droplet, choose the Mastodon image, and once it boots up, you are taken through an interactive setup prompt. The only necessary information for the prompt is a domain name (it should already be pointing at the IP address of your droplet!) and credentials to some e-mail delivery service, like SparkPost, Mailgun, Sendgrid, or something similar. Once you enter them into the setup prompt, your brand new Mastodon server boots up, ready to go.
Eugen Rochko
CEO / Founder
Mastodon quick start guide
So you want to join Mastodon and get tooting. Great! Here's how to dive straight in.
Nico
Guest
Cage the Mastodon
A year ago I wrote about Mastodon’s improvements over Twitter’s lacking protections against abuse and harassment. Development in that area has not been standing still, and it’s about time we do another comparison.
Eugen Rochko
CEO / Founder
How to make friends and verify requests
In the previous tutorial we have learned how to send a reply to another ActivityPub server, and we have used mostly static parts to do it. Now it’s time to talk about how to subscribe to other people and receive messages. The inbox Primarily this means having a publicly accessible inbox and validating HTTP signatures. Once that works, everything else is just semantics. Let’s use a Sinatra web server to implement the inbox.
Eugen Rochko
CEO / Founder
How to become a successful artist on Mastodon
I follow many talented artists on Mastodon, and over my 2 years of being on the platform I have noticed some common patterns that may help a newcomer find their audience on here, too.
Eugen Rochko
CEO / Founder
How to implement a basic ActivityPub server
Today we’ll be looking at how to connect the protocols powering Mastodon in the simplest way possible to enter the federated network. We will use static files, standard command-line tools, and some simple Ruby scripting, although the functionality should be easily adaptable to other programming languages. First, what’s the end goal of this exercise? We want to send a Mastodon user a message from our own, non-Mastodon server. So what are the ingredients required? The message itself will be formatted with ActivityPub, and it must be attributed to an ActivityPub actor. The actor must be discoverable via Webfinger, and the delivery itself must be cryptographically signed by the actor.
Eugen Rochko
CEO / Founder