Hello and welcome to episode 5 of Inspect. My name is Ajakal and in this week's episode I'm going to be talking a little bit about Mastodon. So if you haven't heard of Mastodon already, it's basically a free open source social network which is rivalling Twitter at the moment. It's available on Mastodon.social and reading directly off their homepage, it says it's a Mastodon is a free open source social network, a decentralized alternative to commercial platforms, it avoids the risk of a single company monopolizing your communication.
So what this essentially means is that anybody can run their own server with the Mastodon software on there and then all of these servers communicate with each other to be part of a larger network. Each of these servers are known as an instance of Mastodon and you can find a list of all these instances at the URL instances dot mastodon dot xyz. Now at the time of recording there's around 850 of these instances already created. Not all of them have 100% uptime, not all of them are accepting registrations, some are more popular than others but just to give you an idea some of the URLs that some of these instances are running on are things like mastodon dot org dot uk mastodon dot blue mastodon dot host but then you have some more obscure ones like this one called m4570 dot xyz or nrd dot li or there's a mastodon dot pt, glitz dot social mastodon dot at these are just a few that I'm picking out the list of the ones that are actually running.
So as you can see you can basically install this off to on any URL you choose. So what this allows you to do is install this software on your server to create a localized community and that can be under any URL and the beauty of that is that if users register via your URL to your instance of the service they become part of your local community but then they also have access to the global list of all the servers as well and I suppose this is the biggest selling point of mastodon and why so many people have flocked to it in such a short period of time. It takes away the risk of all of your data being controlled by a single company which a lot of people I guess are worried about in the case of Twitter. So currently there's well over 300,000 people using the service or at least registered on the service and just to give you an idea of the rate of growth I'm recording this on a Sunday and I've just checked the stats now and I've initially made my notes for this episode which was on Tuesday the count was just over 40,000.
So in the space of about five days the number of registered users had grown for 40,000 to well over 300,000 so the network is growing at a rapid pace but what I'm finding is that every time I log on I can't actually find anyone that I know at the moment so although the user base is growing quite rapidly I'm finding that the user base hasn't filtered into my network yet and some of the people that I know haven't got on board yet but I'm sure that will that will change in the coming weeks of so on. So as mentioned earlier the service is basically an exact copy of Twitter with a few terms which have been renamed so instead of a tweet it's an you know have a toot instead of a read tweet it's called a boost a favorite is the favorite a reply is the reply it still has a concept of user names with an ad symbol in the front but it works slightly different the user names become almost like an email address depending on the instance that you registered from so I registered on master.on.social which was the original instance when the service was created so my username becomes ajikarwal at master.social so while I'm logged into my instance of mass and social anyone can find me on the instance without the instance name on the end but if someone is logged in on a different instance they can find me on their instance by adding my instance to the back of my username it's quite confusing and it's one of those things which you'll get once you've actually used it but if you look at the show notes for this episode I'll try and explain it in words once I've given it a bit more thought and you know constructed it into a more sort of coherent sentence and I'll also put a link to my username so you can see how it is constructed as well. So going to the site itself there's essentially three different ways that you can consume the information firstly there's the people that you have followed and they come up in your timeline as it would do in Twitter next you have the local timeline which is everyone who is registered on the on that instance of the software and then finally you have the federated timeline which is a global timeline of all instances so just going on the local timeline which I've just clicked on to now the last post was there was a post 43 seconds ago one minute ago two minutes ago so there's there's a post every minute or so going over to the federated timeline there seems to be a post every two seconds on there so that is like a real-time list of all the messages I wanted to say tweets but they're actually called toots but I don't really like that name anyway we call them messages so all the messages that are being sent across all the different instances are in the federated timeline and that is refreshing constantly so it's not the sort of thing that you would probably keep open it's a bit of an overkill on you know a bit of a distraction while it's there but that's probably where you'll get your real-time news so on Twitter sense you have the trending stories in this case if you look at the federated timeline you'll probably see some trends of what people are talking about in there to get your trending news when you're actually composing a message you can upload images you can add emojis and you can mention people add links in red rich media all the sort of usual things that you would expect but one of the great things about it is that you can adjust the privacy settings per message per toot so what you can do is you can every time you send a message you can either set to public unlisted so it doesn't show in the public timelines but it is available to anyone who's got the URL in the similar way that youtube has unlisted videos you can have it private so that will only go to your followers and you can have it as a direct message which is obviously a one-to-one private message another interesting feature about the way that you can write messages is there's an option to have a content morning so what this allows you to do you select a little checkbox under the message window and that brings up an extra text field where you can write what your warning is so you could write something like the following message contains explicit language for example and then in the main message window you would write your new normal message as you would expect and then once you post that then what is shown to other users is just your warning and next to that is you're they're presented with a show more button which they then have to click on to expand your message this is a really good feature i think and it's a good way to keep the general public timeline quite clean and especially if you're the type of person who wants to share you might want to share like political views which you don't want people to maybe be put off by then you can put these behind a content warning just to warn people that this is something that might be a little bit sensitive so that's one of the one of the features that i actually quite like and finally the beauty of it is you're not limited to 140 characters so it has got a limit which is 500 characters but you know what it allows people to do is give a lot more rich content in their message as well and you don't need to really truncate your messages as much or send multiple messages one after the other to get your point across you can you can basically say a little bit more uh in one go um this is something that twitter is trying to get right at the moment where they recently removed the username from the overall tweet count and they removed uh links to images and videos out of the tweet count as well so your tweet is definitely 140 characters then about how many people you've mentioned or what type of media you've got in there so it's something that they're trying to tackle as well i think they're finding that you know people who want slightly longer tweets and master don't have just nailed that from the beginning by giving you a 500 characters from from the way it go and uh it's probably something that they could quite easily increase uh which i'm sure was being factored in to the way that it's been built as well so yeah so that's master don in a nutshell let me know what you think have you used it have you even heard of it before um is it something that you might be interested in do you do you like the thought of having a decentralized network um are you worried about all of your data being owned by twitter and would you prefer it being distributed across the network um so yeah if you could tweet me or drop me a message you can catch me on twitter at inspect fm or contact me via the website inspect.fm now the master don is available on master don.s social there's also a few apps available for android.io s uh there's a chrome app there's a command line app windows 7 8 10 and also a plugin for emacs i believe or something um but there's a list of those all the documentation is on the github as well it goes into a lot of depth about what the project is about uh why it was started how to install it how to run your own instance if anyone is interested in doing that so i'll put all these links into the show notes as well so you can have a look at those and have a read and uh yeah i'd love to know your thoughts and um maybe you can catch me on there and send me a message on on master don't even and uh we can start a conversation there okay so thank you for listening uh once again all the show notes for this uh episode are available at inspect.fm which will have links to anything that's been mentioned in the show you can find me on twitter at inspect fm and also my personal twitter at ajkahlo does links will also be in the show notes please drop me a message when i'm thoughts that you've got on today's episode or any thoughts that you might have in general which uh any questions that you might have and um i will catch you in the next episode bye