You’re tired of one company deciding what shows up in your feed, and you want a social network you can actually own a piece of. This post explains what Mastodon is, how it works, and how you can follow me on my own server.

What is Mastodon?

Mastodon is a free, decentralized, open source social network that works as an alternative to Twitter. Eugen Rochko created it in 2016.

Decentralized means there’s no single company running the whole thing. Instead, anyone can run their own Mastodon server, called an instance, and all instances talk to each other.

How Mastodon instances connect like email

Mastodon instances connect to each other the same way email providers do. Someone on Gmail can email someone on Proton Mail, and someone on one Mastodon instance can follow someone on another.

That’s why every user has a unique handle with two parts: the username and the instance domain. It looks like this:

@username@domain.tld

The first part is who you are. The second part is the server your account lives on.

What you can do on Mastodon

Mastodon covers what you’d expect from a Twitter-style app. You can:

• Follow people on any Mastodon instance
• Reply to posts (Mastodon users used to call them “toots”)
• Boost other people’s posts, which is like a retweet
• Share photos, GIFs and videos
• Add hashtags and links
• Write a bio and fill in profile fields about yourself

Why I run my own Mastodon instance

I host my own Mastodon instance, kaliex.space, on my own server. As a DevOps engineer who loves open source, running my own corner of the fediverse just felt right: I control the setup, the rules and the data.

If you’re thinking about self-hosting too, you’ll need a server with a domain, a reverse proxy like Nginx, and some patience for updates. My guide on deploying Nginx on Ubuntu with Ansible is a good place to start with the web server side.

How to follow me on Mastodon

To follow me from any Mastodon instance, paste my handle into the search box of your Mastodon app:

@chokri@kaliex.space

Open the profile that shows up and hit Follow. It works the same whether your account is on mastodon.social, a small community server, or your own.

How to support your Mastodon instance

Mastodon instances are run by people like you, who manage the servers and pay for extra disk space and traffic out of their own pocket. If you like how an instance is run, for example clean content or more freedom, consider supporting its admin so it can keep going.

If you like open, self-hostable communication tools, Matrix is worth a look too. I wrote about it in Matrix: your gateway to encrypted, open communication.

See you on the fediverse! 🐘