Mastodon, the federated Twitter clone celebrates its two year anniversary

Two years ago on October 6th 2016, Mastodon was publicly announced on Hacker News by its creator Eugen Rochko. It's an Open Source clone of Twitter, with the added ability for everyone to create their own Mastodon server where users can then sign up on.

Users from different servers can talk to each other, thanks to federation. This allows you to create or join specialized communities with their own moderation policies while still being able to communicate with the wider network if you so choose. Today, there are 3,460 of those servers out there now with 1,627,558 registered users.

Behind the scenes, Mastodon uses the ActivityPub protocol and is compatible with both GNU Social and OStatus, which are earlier attempts to create an Open Source Twitter network. Because it is based on ActivityPub, it can integrate with other ActivityPub apps like the decentralized YouTube alternative PeerTube.

The two year anniversary post on the Mastodon blog has a nice development timeline of how Mastodon improved in these two years and also has links to some articles of Mastodon in the press, which it does poke a bit fun at because tech journalists have often predicted Mastodon would never work and just die off.

If you've never seen Mastodon, this is what the main Mastodon web app looks like:

And here is one of the many third party apps, Tootle, a desktop Mastodon client for Linux:

If you want to try out Mastodon for yourself, go to joinmastodon.org and select one of the instances to sign up for a free account. Mastodon.social is the oldest instance, hosted by Mastodon's creator.

You can find me on Mastodon here.