Learn more about Mastodon, the radically different, free and open-source decentralized social media platform.
The State of the Open Social Web
A comprehensive look at Mastodon, Bluesky, and the growing ecosystem of open, interoperable social networks.
Coho
Discover a simpler way to socialize online with Coho, the Mastodon app that prioritizes ease-of-use and clean design. Experience the open-source, decentralized social network without the clutter. Join communities, share your thoughts, and connect with like-minded individuals all with just a few taps. Say goodbye to overwhelming feeds and complicated features, Coho simplifies the social media experience.
blogs.social — Discover the open web
Discover and follow blogs across Bluesky, Mastodon, RSS, and the open social web.
ActivityPub
Connect your site to the Open Social Web and let millions of users follow, share, and interact with your content from Mastodon, Pixelfed, and more.
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
Platform Stats — blogs.social
Discover and follow blogs across Bluesky, Mastodon, RSS, and the open social web.
Understanding Decentralized Social Feed Curation on Mastodon
Amid rising concerns over moderation, algorithmic control, and platform governance on centralized social media, people are increasingly turning to decentralized alternatives like Mastodon to regain control over their feeds. This shift offers new opportunities to understand how people perceive and curate their feeds. We conducted a two-part study with 21 Mastodon users: first, interviews exploring how they perceive and manage their feeds; and second, a design probe study using BRAIDS.SOCIAL, a web-based feed curation prototype informed by the first part of our initial findings. We learned how seamful design can increase people's trust in algorithmic curation, and surfaced trade-offs people navigate between machine learning-based and rule-based filtering approaches. We also identify a core design tension in decentralized platforms: whether to support personalization through new applications or extensions layered atop existing ones.
FediForum | Growing the Open Social Web:<br>An Online Un-Workshop
Since the Twitter takeover by Elon Musk over three years ago, the Open Social Web has been adopted by an enthusiastic community. People world-wide are building and using open social platforms and open social protocols to better interact with others online.
Pixelfed - Decentralized social media
Learn more about Pixelfed, the free and open-source decentralized photo sharing social media platform
Looking AT the Blue Skies of Bluesky
The pitfalls of centralized social networks, such as Facebook and Twitter/X, have led to concerns about control, transparency, and accountability. Decentralized social networks have emerged as a result with the goal of empowering users. These decentralized approaches come with their own trade-offs, and therefore multiple architectures exist. In this paper, we conduct the first large-scale analysis of Bluesky, a prominent decentralized microblogging platform. In contrast to alternative approaches (e.g. Mastodon), Bluesky decomposes and opens the key functions of the platform into subcomponents that can be provided by third party stakeholders. We collect a comprehensive dataset covering all the key elements of Bluesky, study user activity and assess the diversity of providers for each sub-components.
Bluesky and the AT Protocol: Usable Decentralized Social Media
Bluesky is a new social network built upon the AT Protocol, a decentralized foundation for public social media. It was launched in private beta in February 2023, and has grown to over 10 million registered users by October 2024. In this paper we introduce the architecture of Bluesky and the AT Protocol, and explain how the technical design of Bluesky is informed by our goals: to enable decentralization by having multiple interoperable providers for every part of the system; to make it easy for users to switch providers; to give users agency over the content they see; and to provide a simple user experience that does not burden users with complexity arising from the system's decentralized nature. The system's openness allows anybody to contribute to content moderation and community management, and we invite the research community to use Bluesky as a dataset and testing ground for new approaches in social media moderation.
How to discover hashtags to follow on Mastodon and the wider Fediverse
An unofficial guide to using Mastodon and the Fediverse
Many people are talking about decentralized social media protocols like #ActivityPub and #ATProto and all the amazing things one can do with them. But do you actually know how they work? We thought we'd do something about this. Come to #FediForum next week if you are curious and like to find […]
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