Lukather Blog

Note: this is the English version of a post I wrote in January 2021 when I joined Mastodon.

Distrotube is a channel I have been following for a few weeks now. It's a channel dedicated to 'Linux stuff' and since I've been playing around with this OS again lately (maybe I'll write about it in the future) I've started to get interested in the subject again.

Through my friend Distrotube I discovered Mastodon.

And what is Mastodon? I'll let the italian blog Le Alternative help me explain:

It is a social network identical to Twitter. Identical at least aesthetically, so if you come from Twitter you will more or less immediately understand its main functions. One of the few differences, at least in everyday use for those who are used to using Twitter, is the number of characters you can write: they are in fact 500. Tweets, on the other hand, are called toots. And retweets are shares. Its mascot is a mammoth instead of a bird.

Like you and me, they wonder why they prefer it to Twitter. And here we need to talk about privacy, data re-appropriation, and decentralisation. Not such an easy topic to talk about. Over the next few days I will try to share articles and videos that can explain and dissect this topic better than I can.

To put it simply, unlike Twitter (and other social media such as Facebook/Instagram), Mastodon does not have a company behind it that controls it (and a CEO and stock exchange listing), there are no 'interests' driving the development of the software and the management of our data (I am clearly thinking of the sale of advertising space). In Mastodon, tweets are called Toot and can be 500 characters long, everything else about the UI is quite similar: there is a timeline (real, in chronological order and not 'driven' by some AI or Machine Learning routine), there are retweets called boosts, there are likes and everything else you might expect from Twitter. Decentralisation, however, is its strong point. Anyone can create a server (called an instance) at any address, dictate their own rules and manage it as they wish.

You can therefore find servers dedicated to Linux, cars, technology, and generic ones where you can talk about anything, from Pokèmon, to sewing, to your own city. And if you don't find the one that suits you, you can create your own, with no limits or problems.

“OK, but then you don't create silos?”. Here comes the beauty of the fediverse (I'll talk about this in a future article as well). Let's say you subscribed to the Italian generalist instance mastodon.uno but still want to read what's going on in the Distrotube instance, or follow Derek Taylor. No problem, just search for Derek Taylor (or know his address which is @derek@distrotoot.com) and click on “follow”, at which point you will see his Toot inside the timeline of the Mastodon.uno instance, you will be able to interact with him by replying to Toot, like and even boost. Convenient, no?

All these are thanks to ActivityPub, a protocol dedicated to decentralised social networks. There are so many of them but the most interesting, apart from Mastodon, are Peertube for videos and Pixelfed for photos.

There is an incredible and very interesting world to explore, I am just starting out, I have scratched the surface and I am already in love with it.

Ah, this blog is also federated (thanks to Write Freely)