Updates from the Mastodon team
Our ideas about Packs
Sharing our thoughts and plans behind sharing collections of accounts in the Fediverse.
Imani Joy
Product Designer
Introducing quote posts
Over the years, we’ve learned just how essential quoting is to many of you. Here's a deep dive on how quote posts will work on Mastodon.
The Mastodon Team
Building a better social web
Bringing Quote Posts to Mastodon
Sharing our thinking and progress on bringing Quote Posts to Mastodon, with a goal to create a safe and respectful space for everyone.
The Mastodon Team
Building a better social web
What to know about Threads
There’s been a lot of speculation around what Threads will be and what it means for Mastodon. We’ve put together some of the most common questions and our responses based on what was launched today.
Eugen Rochko
Strategy & Product Advisor, 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
Strategy & Product Advisor, Founder
Why ActivityPub is the future
We often tout things like “Mastodon is based on open web protocols” as one of its advantages. I want to elaborate why exactly that’s a good thing.
Eugen Rochko
Strategy & Product Advisor, 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
Strategy & Product Advisor, Founder
Mastodon and the W3C
Mastodon is a free, open-source federated social network spanning over 800,000 users spread across more than 2,000 servers. Mastodon v1.6 is here, and it is the first Mastodon release which fully implements the ActivityPub protocol. ActivityPub is a new federated messaging protocol developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) which aims to fix the shortcomings of past standards like OStatus. Mastodon is one of the first platforms, and certainly the first major platform to implement this new standard and prove it in the wild. It was a natural upgrade for our project, as we long ago reached the limits of what OStatus was capable of. And what we needed was better privacy, better defaults, better cryptographic verifiability, and better distribution mechanisms.
Eugen Rochko
Strategy & Product Advisor, Founder