PC Magazine: The Best Mastodon Apps for 2023. “Mastodon looks and feels like Twitter but is a beast all its own, and the death of third-party Twitter apps has driven some of those developers to the decentralized, open-source Mastodon. There are now dozens of Mastodon apps to try across numerous platforms. For this article, we tested 18 different Mastodon client applications across mobile, web, and desktop.”
Fast Company: Twitter alternative Mastodon is fixing its confusing sign-up process—and adding new features. “Mastodon, which many have considered the social media site most likely to take Twitter’s place, is making itself more user friendly. The platform, on Monday, announced a series of changes to make it more intuitive for new users—and rewarded current members with an update on some long-requested features. Together, the actions could give Mastodon a boost, just as Bluesky’s momentum begins to surge and Twitter’s star continues to dim.”
ZDNet: Quitting Twitter? How to join a Mastodon server with the official Android app. “If you’re looking for the best mobile app for Mastodon, you can’t go wrong with the official software. Find out how to connect that app to your Mastodon server of choice.”
PC Magazine: What’s Happening to Twitter Could Never Happen to Mastodon. “Several Twitter crises ago, my editor pitched me the idea for this story. The suggestion was to explain not just why I thought Mastodon—a decentralized social network for Twitter-style posts—was better than Twitter, but also how it could resist whatever Musk-inflicted wound was in the news at the time. I liked the idea, but I didn’t get around to writing it. A few weeks later there was another crisis at Twitter (there have been so many I honestly can’t remember which one) and this story came up again. And again. And again. And so now, I think it’s finally time to run down the list and explain why Mastodon is structurally and technically impervious to the madness that is plaguing Twitter.”
The Guardian: Thousands fled to Mastodon after Musk bought Twitter. Are they still ‘tooting’?. “Some of Mastodon’s most passionate users – who tend to be more tech-savvy than average – say it’s no problem if the community stays small. Here, things aren’t designed to go viral quickly. There’s no global search or global hashtags. Servers can easily be made private, and admins can block other servers to combat trolls. There’s also a feature to put posts behind content warnings, which users are encouraged to do for sensitive topics.” I quite like it. I just need it to integrate with IFTTT so I can curate content better.
ZDNet: How to bookmark a Mastodon post (and why you should). “What is this feature? It’s very much like the bookmarks you use on your web browser — a convenient method of saving a post so you can easily refer to it later. You may not have used the bookmark feature on Twitter, but Mastodon is different. ”
Washington Post Engineering: Here’s how The Washington Post verified its journalists on Mastodon. “A small cross-disciplinary team of engineers worked together to add a feature so journalists at The Washington Post could link their Mastodon profiles from The Post’s website and verify themselves on the social network.”
Search Engine Journal: How Does Mastodon Work And How Do You Get Started?. “Mastodon is a decentralized and self-hosted social platform and a popular alternative to Twitter. Learn how it works and how to get started.”
IT World Canada: Mastodon passes the 10 million account milestone. “Mastodon is owned by a German not-for-profit. It cannot be sold, and even if there were some way around this, the protocols that support the federation of servers are open source. In fact, Meta’s rumoured new Twitter replacement will use the same open-source protocols called ActivityPub that supports Mastodon.”
IEEE Spectrum: Decentralized Social Media Rises as Twitter Melts Down Mastodon is just the start—here comes the Fediverse . “Is the future of social media decentralized? That question might’ve felt absurd a few years ago, but the Fediverse is challenging long-held assumptions about how social media should work.”
WordPress Blog: Making the Social Web a Better Place: ActivityPub for WordPress Joins the Automattic Family. “We’re excited to announce that Automattic, the parent company of WordPress.com, has acquired the popular WordPress plugin ActivityPub. This innovative plugin brings a whole new level of social networking to your website by integrating it with the wider federated social web. When installed, the plugin allows you to easily share your content and interact with users on Mastodon and other platforms that also support the ActivityPub protocol.
WP Tavern: Toot the Word Survey Finds Mastodon Increasingly Important to WordPress’ Community of Tooters. “Nearly all participants of the survey expect Mastodon to have some kind of influence on the WordPress community in the future, a majority thinks Mastodon will be very influential or extremely influential. Most of the participants want to see more WordPress content and community discussions on Mastodon in the future.”
WP Tavern: Jetpack 11.9 Adds Sharing Button for Mastodon, Updates Stats Dashboard Design. “Jetpack 11.9 was released this week with support for sharing posts to Mastodon. The new button allows readers to click an icon to launch a sharing window that will ask the user to enter the full URL of the Mastodon instance where they want to share the post.” Stopped and immediately added Mastodon sharing buttons to ResearchBuzz, ResearchBuzz Firehose, and Search Gizmos.
TechCrunch: Flipboard joins the Fediverse with a Mastodon integration and community, plans for ActivityPub . “Magazine app Flipboard is joining the Fediverse — the group of interconnected servers powering a range of open source, decentralized applications, including the newly popular Twitter alternative Mastodon. Starting today, the Flipboard app for iOS will include a beta feature that will allow Mastodon users to visually flip through their timeline to view posts from the people they follow, much like they’ve been able to do with Twitter.”
SURF Netherlands: Mastodon pilot for research and education . “SURF and Universities of the Netherlands are jointly exploring Mastodon as an open source platform for education and research in the Netherlands. In which public values are paramount. We launched a pilot in February 2023. Join us and discover how students, researchers, staff and institutions can experiment with Mastodon in a low-threshold way.”
