







FR#158 – What is Mastodon for?
On AI and place, and how Mastodon gives tools to create communities at the instance level, but people experience 'place' at the federation level.

Beyond Mastodon and Bluesky - Toward a Protocol-Agnostic Federation
You’ve heard of stuff like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Make an account on one, and it only works there. You can’t send a DM to your friend on Twitter from Facebook Messenger. You can’t browse your friend’s Instagram feed from Twitter. Each one is closed off
Beyond Mastodon and Bluesky - Toward a Protocol-Agnostic Federation
You’ve heard of stuff like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Make an account on one, and it only works there. You can’t send a DM to your friend on Twitter from Facebook Messenger. You can’t browse your friend’s Instagram feed from Twitter. Each one is closed off
Mastodon - Decentralized social media
Learn more about Mastodon, the radically different, free and open-source decentralized social media platform.

maegul (@maegul@hachyderm.io)
I think the #Ghost and #Wordpress federations pose interesting questions about what #fediverse platforms can and should be. Do we actually want blogs and feeds of blogs folded into a mastodon/microblog social feed? Do we want to read and comment on blogs on mastodon? Do we want all the diversity of the fediverse fed into a single platform's UI and hope that it works well? Are we worried that some choices by our platform or instance admin might hinder this process? I'm rather skeptical. 1/
The politics of decentralization and the libertarian allure of Mastodon – Structural Integrity
I am currently reading the fabulous “Hayek’s Bastards” by Quinn Slobodian. It made me think about decentralisation in Mastodon (yes, the federated social network). And it made me think about the lack of a coherent progressive vision for the digital age. I will explain what that book has to do with both. But let’s go back to the political meaning of “decentralisation” in digital discourse first.

Mastodon and the Fediverse is too noisy. Why?
Mastodon and most Fediverse platforms may be better than traditional social networks at interoperability but they don’t do much about other issues. In fact, they largely copy these issues straight from the social media giants. Most Fediverse platforms, including Mastodon, publicly display follower counts, like (favorite) counts, and share
Mastodon pilot for research and education
SURF and Universities of the Netherlands are jointly exploring Mastodon as an open source platform for education and research in the Netherlands.

The many branches of the Fediverse
As more and more people are asking me about Mastodon I felt a need for a picture to point at, showcasing how the software known as Mastodon fits into the much larger concept of the Fediverse. I made this infographic to help myself and others explain the many different use-

Are We Decentralized Yet?
Statistics on how concentrated user accounts and data are across the Fediverse, the Atmosphere, web hosting, email, and other Internet infrastructure.

Federation Architecture | Bluesky
The AT Protocol is made up of a bunch of pieces that stack together. Federation means that anyone can run the parts that make up the AT Protocol themselves, such as their own server.

Moderation is an unsolved problem. Fascism & transphobia prosper in parts of Mastodon. There’s no support to deal with this. The hardest part is funding. It relies on community funding for server costs. There’s also a huge amount of work to be done around the scenes, moderating and fixing problems.
Why we discontinued our Mastodon server
gfsc.communityDutch Universities are jointly exploring Mastodon as an open source platform for education and research in the Netherlands. Exciting, and hopefully just the start of a much bigger trend! (that ofc also includes #atscience!)
Mastodon pilot for research and education
www.surf.nlNew from me: Federation Has a European Legal Problem on what the recent Russmedia ruling means for open social protocols like ActivityPub and atproto warning: do not read if you value your sanity connectedplaces.online/federation-has-a-european-leg…
Federation Has a European Legal Problem
connectedplaces.online