Updates from the Mastodon team
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
The role of mastodon.social in the Mastodon ecosystem
Can you imagine Facebook closing registrations and saying “Sorry, we have too many users already, you can go sign up on Twitter instead”? And yet, this sort of situation comes up with Mastodon every so often, in regards to the mastodon.social server. You see, Mastodon is decentralized. That means there is no “main” server. If mastodon.social actually disappeared from the face of the Earth, it would not bring down the Mastodon network at all. But it is one of the biggest servers, meaning that if you look at the registered userbase, it is “effectively centralized”. 300,000 is not a small chunk of 2,000,000, after all.
Eugen Rochko
CEO / Founder
Mastodon 2.7
In this release: New profile directory, new tutorial, new public hashtag pages and more moderation tools
Eugen Rochko
CEO / Founder
Why does decentralization matter?
Reasons why you should care about how your social network is run and structured
Eugen Rochko
CEO / Founder
Top 30 most shared Mastodon posts in 2018
Inspired by a joke post I decided to go ahead and compile a list of the most shared things on Mastodon in 2018.
Eugen Rochko
CEO / Founder
From Tumblr to Mastodon
A lot of artists have lost their blogs in the Tumblr purge. Here are 5 reasons why Mastodon is the perfect alternative.
Eugen Rochko
CEO / Founder
Mastodon 2.6 released
After more than a month of work, I am happy to announce the new version of Mastodon, with improved visuals, a new way to assert your identity, and a lot of bug fixes. Verification Verifying identity in a network with no central authority is not straightforward. But there is a way. It requires a change in mindset, though. Twitter teaches us that people who have a checkmark next to their name are real and important, and those that don’t are not. That delegates a lot of the decision making to Twitter, the authority. Without a central authority, that decision making cannot be delegated. So, how does identity verification work on Mastodon?
Eugen Rochko
CEO / Founder
Mastodon's 2 Year Anniversary
Mastodon was first announced to the public through Hacker News, a link aggregator site for programmers, on October 6, 2016. Now we’re celebrating the 2 year anniversary! 🎉
Eugen Rochko
CEO / Founder
Mastodon 2.5 released
Mastodon 2.5 is the 100th released version of Mastodon since the project’s inception almost 2 years ago. It brings a variety of improvements to the software, the full list of which is available in the changelog. Public profile page The public areas of the web interface have been redesigned. The color scheme and design is now more consistent with the logged-in interface. The new profile layout makes better use of space for bio text and increases the value of header images. Prominent follow buttons ensure that even people new to Mastodon understand quickly what they can do on it.
Eugen Rochko
CEO / Founder