Misplaced Pages

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57-444: At its peak in popularity, GNU social had been deployed on hundreds of interconnected instances, however has since fallen into disuse as competing software like Mastodon and Pleroma have taken its position as the dominant federated microblogging services. Later on in its lifespan, the project split into two separate branches , with "v2" being a continuation of the original codebase for maintenance of existing instances, with "v3" being

114-622: A Cayman Islands -based entity affiliated with Web3 firm Mask Network. Pawoo is banned by most instances on Mastodon due to allowing lolicon art. In April 2019, computer manufacturer Purism released a fork of Mastodon named Librem Social. Gab , a controversial social network with a far-right user base, changed its software platform to a fork of Mastodon and became the largest Mastodon node in July 2019. Gab's adoption of Mastodon allowed Gab to be accessed from third-party Mastodon applications, although four of them blocked Gab shortly after

171-444: A Mastodon instance's trending topics, not arbitrary popular words. Trending topics vary between instances, since individual instances are aware of different subsets of posts from the whole fediverse . Quote posts do not exist on Mastodon, and quotes from other instances that run software with quotes do not display an embed of the quoted post. While previously rejected from being implemented due to issues with toxicity and harassment,

228-611: A competing social media company named after himself", being banned. Subsequently, Mastodon users wrote fictional backstories and memes about "John Mastodon" and circulated the hashtag #JohnMastodon . Following the Mastodon suspension and ban on Mastodon links on Twitter, Twitter introduced a new policy on 18 December to prohibit sharing links on Twitter to a variety of social media websites, with Mastodon being one of those blocked. The policy stated that it prohibited links in both tweets and account details and that accounts that violated

285-467: A complete redesign of the project meant to integrate further ActivityPub support and modernization of the user experience and its technological back-end. As of August 15, 2022, there had been no new commits to the v2 branch, with the v3 branch also no longer being actively developed not long after by November 25, 2022, with the project essentially abandoned. Despite its modern obsolescence and dated design compared to modern platforms, GNU social and StatusNet

342-557: A formal letter to Truth Social's chief legal officer on 26 October 2021. On 12 November 2021, Truth Social published its source code. In April 2022, the European Union launched its own Mastodon and PeerTube instances via the European Data Protection Supervisor , dubbing them "EU Voice" and "EU Video". The instances were a test run of whether it would be sustainable to run its own social media platforms. While

399-409: A hosting service under the status.net domain from sources such as First Mark Capital , BOLDstart Ventures, iNovia Capital and Montreal Start Up, raising over $ 2.3 million in funding up to that point. The hosting service allowed anyone to establish their own StatusNet instance without maintaining a server, similar to WordPress.com and other blogging platforms. New registrations on identi.ca along with

456-594: A limitation imported from SMS . Beginning with version 0.8.1, the name was changed to StatusNet. The developers said that the new name "simply reflects what our software does: send status updates into your social net work." A basic GNU social instance takes the form of a microblogging service with a reverse chronological timeline that features status updates and small messages from followed accounts, similar to other services such as Twitter or Weibo . While users could see their own customized timeline, they could access another timeline that showcased every message that

513-813: A lower-value target and reduces potential damage. The creator of Mastodon, Eugen Rochko, argues that these issues do not set it apart from other software products that can be hosted by non-professionals. In 2023, the Mozilla Foundation contracted cybersecurity firm Cure53 to perform penetration testing on the Mastodon software, in preparation for establishing an instance for the Mozilla community. The testing discovered several vulnerabilities, including one called "TootRoot" that would have enabled arbitrary code execution and another that would have enabled cross-site scripting attacks through oEmbed cards. These vulnerabilities were patched in July 2023. Mastodon has been

570-414: A private beta. However, the instance has since been discontinued and will be offline as of December 17, 2024. While Mastodon's decentralized structure is one of its most distinctive features, it also poses additional security challenges. Since many Mastodon instances are run by volunteers, some security experts are concerned about data security and responsiveness to new threats and vulnerabilities across

627-617: A project has since started via funding from NLnet with the goal of implementing a standard that avoids these issues. In September 2018, with the release of version 2.5 with redesigned public profile pages, Mastodon marked its 100th release. Mastodon 2.6 was released in October 2018, introducing the possibilities of verified profiles and live, in-stream link previews for images and videos. Version 2.7, in January 2019, made it possible to search for multiple hashtags at once, instead of searching for just

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684-646: A single hashtag. Version 2.7 has more robust moderation capabilities for server administrators and moderators, while accessibility, such as contrast for users with sight issues, was improved. The ability for users to create and vote in polls, as well as a new invitation system to manage registrations was integrated in April 2019. Mastodon 2.8.1, released in May 2019, made images with content warnings blurred instead of completely hidden. In version 2.9 in June 2019, an optional single-column view

741-764: A single, global policy on content moderation . Servers can choose to limit or filter out messages with disparaging content. The main author of the Mastodon software, Eugen Rochko , believes that small, closely related communities deal with unwanted behavior more effectively than a large company's small safety team. Users can also block and report others to administrators, much like on Twitter. Instance administrators can block other instances from interacting with their own, an action called defederation . By posting toots hashtagged with #fediblock , some instance administrators and users alert others of issues requiring moderation. Unlike Twitter (now known as X ), Mastodon by default only allows for hashtags and mentioned accounts in

798-458: A specific Mastodon server, rather than a single centralized website or application. The servers are connected as nodes in a network, and each server can administer its own rules, account privileges, and whether to share messages to and from other servers. Many servers have a theme based on a specific interest. Mastodon includes a number of specific privacy features. Each message has a variety of privacy options available, and users can choose whether

855-483: Is a community project created and supported by the Free Software Foundation . Its objective is the promotion of free software around the world by bringing every year an international conference to local communities and organizations. The project was born in 2006, at a gathering of members associated with the Free Software Foundation and the will to organize into geographical groups. The wiki serves as

912-567: Is an Indian social networking product launched in September 2020 that uses the Mastodon source code, initially without releasing its modifications. The service also identified itself as being wholly made in India, despite its origin. In October 2021, former US President Donald Trump founded Truth Social , which is based on Mastodon. Initially, Truth Social did not make its source code available, violating Mastodon's AGPLv3 license. Eugen Rochko sent

969-468: Is generally considered to be a part of the Fediverse . Mastodon was created by Eugen Rochko and revealed to the public via Hacker News in October 2016. Not long after, it quickly gained popularity and became the dominant platform in the fediverse and overtaking the previous leader, GNU social . It gained significant adoption in 2022 following the acquisition of Twitter by Elon Musk . The project

1026-466: Is maintained by the German non-profit Mastodon GmbH . Development of Mastodon is crowd-funded, and does not contain any support for advertisements or monetized features. Mastodon servers run social networking software that is capable of communicating using W3C 's ActivityPub standard, which has been implemented since version 1.6. A Mastodon user can therefore interact with users on any other server in

1083-623: Is powered by Ruby on Rails and Node.js , with its web client being written in React.js and Redux . The only database software supported is PostgreSQL , with Redis being used for job processing and various actions that Mastodon needs to process. The service is interoperable with the fediverse , a collection of social networking services which use the ActivityPub protocol for communication between each other, with previous versions containing support for OStatus . Client apps for interacting with

1140-404: Is regarded to be the origin of the Fediverse network and has had a major influence on the design of more modern decentralized social networks that succeeded it. While being the main project within its lineage, GNU social originally began as a fork of StatusNet. The software was first developed for a service called identi.ca from Evan Prodromou , which offered free microblogging accounts to

1197-506: The Fediverse that supports ActivityPub. Since version 2.9.0, Mastodon has offered a single-column mode for new users by default. In advanced mode, Mastodon approximates the microblogging interface of TweetDeck . Users post short-form status messages, historically known as "toots", for others to see. On a standard Mastodon instance, these messages can include up to 500 text-based characters, greater than Twitter's 280-character limit. Some instances support even longer messages. Users join

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1254-612: The Fediverse to be searched, but allows server administrators to enable functionality via Elasticsearch to search for the full text of public posts that have opted-in to being indexed. Searches are limited to all content that the instance knows about, either locally or from other instances that have been indexed. However, services utilizing the ActivityPub protocol exist which allow for searching all posts on all instances as long as users opt-in. For similar reasons, only hashtags can appear in

1311-676: The Mastodon API are available for desktop computer operating systems, including Windows , macOS and the Linux family of operating systems, as well as mobile phones running iOS and Android . The API is open for anyone to utilize, allowing clients to be built for any operating system that can connect to the internet . While Mastodon was first released in October 2016, the service began to expand in late March and early April 2017. Servers were mostly operated by academic institutions, journalists, hobbyists, and activists. The Verge wrote that

1368-507: The ability to create new status.net instances was disabled in December 2012, in preparation for a migration to pump.io that has since been named by users of StatusNet and OStatus as "the Pumpocalypse". pump.io was a brand new software package like StatusNet, but with a new protocol designed for general purpose activity streams outside of microblogging and ease-of-use for developers building on

1425-538: The backend and user interface of GNU social, as well as to add compatibility for Diaspora 's protocol. The original name of StatusNet was Laconica, a reference to the Laconic phrase ; a particularly brief statement commonly attributed to the leaders of Sparta ( Laconia being the Greek region containing Sparta). In microblogging, all messages are designed to be very short due to the traditional 140-character limit on message size,

1482-480: The change. In response, Mastodon's main contributors stated in their blog that they were "completely opposed to Gab’s project and philosophy", and criticized Gab for attempting "to monetize and platform racist content while hiding behind the banner of free speech" and for " paywalling basic features that are freely available on Mastodon". Gab later removed federation with ActivityPub due to various perceived technical issues and plans to build its own protocol. Tooter

1539-499: The community at this time was small and that it had yet to attract the personalities that keep users at Twitter. The global use had risen from 766,500 users as of 1 August 2017, to 1 million users on 1 December 2017. In   November 2017 artists, writers, and entrepreneurs such as Chuck Wendig , John Scalzi , Melanie Gillman and later John O'Nolan joined in. Another spike in popularity came in March through April 2018, due to

1596-423: The concerns about user privacy raised by the #deletefacebook effort. Membership of Mastodon and other alternative social media sites increased in early December 2018 after Tumblr announced its intention to ban all adult content from the site. In November 2019, nearly 20,000 Twitter users in India temporarily shifted to Mastodon over complaints by users against Twitter's moderation policies. To circumvent

1653-458: The federated network had grown to 665,000 active users, with a few growing pains. In particular, Mastodon's largest instance, mastodon.social, needed capacity upgrades to handle the new load. Accounts on a server called journa.host founded by Adam Davidson are restricted to professional journalists. Mastodon's increased adoption continued in the days following the Twitter takeover. On 11 November,

1710-460: The federated timeline shows messages across all participating Mastodon servers. Users can communicate across connected Mastodon servers with usernames similar in format to full email addresses. In early 2017, journalists like Sarah Jeong distinguished Mastodon from Twitter for its approach to combating harassment. Mastodon uses community-based moderation, in which each server can limit or filter out undesirable types of content, while Twitter uses

1767-417: The hidden main body of the message to reveal it. Mastodon servers have used this feature to hide spoilers , trigger warnings , and not safe for work (NSFW) content, though some accounts use the feature to hide links and thoughts others might not want to read. Mastodon aggregates messages in local and federated timelines in real time. The local timeline shows messages from users on a singular server, while

GNU social - Misplaced Pages Continue

1824-453: The increasing online censorship of social networks in mainland China, an increasing number of Chinese-language users have chosen to migrate to Mastodon in 2022. A spike in Mastodon's user participation occurred in April 2022, following the 25   April announcement of Elon Musk purchasing Twitter . By 27   April, 30,000 new users had joined Mastodon. On 28   April 2022, the European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS) launched

1881-406: The instance knows of, including from other instances that were connected to each other if someone on the instance followed an account from it. Users could also create and join groups, which allows for discussion and collaboration on specific topics. Administrators can also customize their server via the plugin system , which allows developers to create new features or modify existing plugins to suit

1938-436: The intention of maintaining it as a personal project, dubbing it "Free Social". However, following identi.ca's transition to pump.io and its developers' sudden abandonment of StatusNet, the projects received more attention from server administrators and other users looking for an actively updated alternative. Shortly after LibrePlanet 2012, a plan was formed to merge all three projects into a single service. On June 8, 2013, it

1995-590: The load of a victim's server. A fix to add federation for link previews was planned for 4.3, but has since been delayed for Mastodon 4.4. Mastodon is crowdfunded and does not contain ads; as of November 2022, it was supported by 3,500 people. Since 2021 it has been registered in Germany as a nonprofit organization ( German : gemeinnützige GmbH ); a US nonprofit was established in April 2024. The organization started selling stuffed toys in October 2024. LibrePlanet LibrePlanet (literally, "Free Planet")

2052-407: The main suspect in an issue regarding the generation of OpenGraph link previews, wherein the data from the link is not cached by the post and transmitted to other instances. Many instances in turn automatically fetch the preview data as well as soon as they receive the post (which can be near-instantaneously after the post is created), creating an accidental DDoS attack that can temporarily increase

2109-430: The message is public or private. Public messages display on a global feed, known as a timeline, and private messages are only shared on the timelines of the user's followers. Messages can also be marked as unlisted from timelines or direct between users. Users can also mark their accounts as completely private. In the timeline, messages can display with an optional content warning feature, which requires readers to click on

2166-445: The name Quitter such as Quitter.se, an instance created by the developer of the theme. Before the establishment of Mastodon 's popularity and dominance within the network, Quitter was noted as a frequent location for users of Twitter to migrate to when users disagreed with moderation policies or feature updates, such as when an algorithmic feed was added to Twitter. A fork of GNU social was made called postActiv, which planned to rewrite

2223-542: The needs of the instance via PHP. A notable plugin built for GNU social was Quitter, a revamp of the user interface that resembles an earlier version of Twitter's user interface. Mastodon (social network) Mastodon is an open source , self-hosted , social networking service . Mastodon uses the ActivityPub protocol for federation which allows users to communicate between independent Mastodon instances and other ActivityPub compatible services. Mastodon has microblogging features similar to Twitter , and

2280-407: The network, considering the difficulty of configuring and maintaining an instance as well as uneven skill levels among administrators. Configuration errors and security bugs in server implementation has already led to user data being scraped or modified by attackers. It is worth noting that Mastodon also collects considerably less personal data, compared to other social media platforms, which makes it

2337-409: The number of new users of the platform compared to the previous week was reported to be 700,000, moving Mastodon over the 7 million user mark. During that period, several prominent figures joined Mastodon, including prominent actors, comedians, journalists, political activists, and politicians. In December 2022, the number of monthly active users of Mastodon reached two million. On 15 December,

GNU social - Misplaced Pages Continue

2394-502: The official ActivityPub microblogging platform ( EU Voice ) of the EU institutions, bodies and agencies (EUIs), based on Mastodon. Musk's acquisition became final on 27   October 2022. Mastodon had an increase of 70,000 new users from a resultant " diaspora " on 28 October alone. Daily downloads increased substantially, rising from 3,400 daily downloads on 27 October to 113,400 on 6 November 2022. According to Rochko, by 3 November, use of

2451-405: The official Mastodon Twitter account was banned from Twitter, as well as other accounts with links to some Mastodon instances . On the following day, Twitter began to flag all Mastodon links as malware, preventing Twitter users from sharing them. A Mediaite opinion piece on the bannings included an erroneous report of an account for "John Mastodon" (a misspelling of @joinmastodon ), "founder of

2508-481: The pilot ended two years later in 2024 (after an extension in 2023 for another year) and taking the instances offline after being unable to find an organization that would take over operations, the European Commission has launched their own separate instance. In December 2022, the Mozilla Foundation launched a Mastodon instance under mozilla.social, initially with closed registrations before opening it up as

2565-433: The policy would be suspended. By 19 December, the policy and official mentions about it had been removed from Twitter web pages. Musk stated the following day that banning users for posting Mastodon links had been a mistake. Rochko stated that at least five venture capital firms looking to invest in Mastodon had been turned away by December 2022, and that Mastodon's nonprofit status would not be jeopardized. By

2622-446: The primary portal for people who want to become involved in free software activism in local, grassroots modes of cooperation. The conference is organized annually by the Free Software Foundation in or around Boston, Massachusetts and staffed by a mixture of foundation staff and community volunteers. The conference replaces and incorporates the FSF annual members meeting which ran around

2679-450: The project called OpenMicroBlogging (OMB). With version 0.8.1, the name of the software was changed to StatusNet. Version 0.9.0 was released soon after in March 3, 2010, with the developers implementing a newly designed protocol dubbed OStatus , with support for OMB being dropped not long after. Compared to OpenMicroBlogging, OStatus could handle and federate more events and actions than the basic plaintext communication that OMB provided and

2736-425: The public. The software quickly became one of the first popular examples of a decentralized social network , as identi.ca allowed any other server that was running the software to communicate with it, something which had not previously been attempted before in social media at such a large scale. Originally, StatusNet (named Laconica at the time) was launched with a communication protocol designed specifically for

2793-576: The release was part of an effort to attract new users. Mastodon 4.0 was released in November 2022, including language support for translating posts, editing posts and following hashtags. Mastodon is published as free and open-source software under the Affero GPL license, allowing anyone to use the software or modify it as they wish. Servers can be run by any individual or organization, and users can join these servers as they wish. The server software itself

2850-538: The service and identify themselves as a Mastodon instance, others have attempted to conceal their origin by removing all mentions of Mastodon from the public view. These instances also don't release their source code modifications, violating the AGPLv3 license in use by Mastodon. In 2017, Pixiv launched a Mastodon-based social network named Pawoo. The service was acquired by media company Russell in December 2019; in December 2022, Russell sold it to The Social Coop Limited,

2907-423: The software would be picked up by a new maintainer. The transition for identi.ca users to pump.io was completed on 12 July 2013. GNU social originally began as a side project of GNU FM (Libre.fm) maintainer Matt Lee, with the goal of being able to federate messages between Last.fm and other instances of GNU FM using StatusNet plugins. Around the same time, a developer named Mikael Nordfeldth forked StatusNet with

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2964-400: The start of January 2023, Mastodon had 1.8 million active users, down 30% from its peak of over 2.5 million active users in early December 2022. On 19 March 2023, Mastodon surpassed the ten million mark for registered user accounts. In July 2023, Mastodon’s founder, Eugen Rochko, stated that monthly active users were increasing again, surpassing the 2-million mark. that ensued, there

3021-417: The technology, much like the transition from OMB to OStatus. The announcement was seen as unexpected among identi.ca users, who were concerned about the possibility of their statuses being deleted with the transition. At the same time, server administrators running third-party instances and their users who were left behind on StatusNet were also worried, as it was unclear at the time whether future development of

3078-432: Was a significant migration of users to alternative platforms. Mastodon has been considered a prominent alternative in this landscape, alongside platforms like Threads and Bluesky . As a result of its open source nature and ability to be deployed without restriction, various organizations, companies and governments have started their own Mastodon instances. While some instances have mentioned their usage of Mastodon for

3135-419: Was added. This view became the default displayed to new users, with a user "preferences" option to switch to a multiple-column-based view. In August 2020, Mastodon 3.2 was released. It included a redesigned audio player with custom thumbnails and the ability to add personal notes to one's profile. In July 2021, an official client for iOS devices was released. According to the project's CEO, Eugen Rochko ,

3192-452: Was announced that along with Free Social, StatusNet would be merged into the GNU social project and stewarded by the Free Software Foundation , with the project since becoming the dominant variant of StatusNet. During GNU social's lifespan, a popular theme for the user interface named Quitter was used, which was similar to an earlier Twitter interface. Many instances were made specifically using

3249-497: Was based on a variety of other web technologies, allowing for easier adoption of new implementations of the protocol for servers and clients compared to the fully custom architecture of OMB. With the StatusNet name change, the company developing both the software and OStatus as well as managing identi.ca rebranded from Control Yourself to StatusNet Inc. In August 2010, the company raised a new round of venture capital funds to establish

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