I’m working on an alternative, clean implementation of the federated social network GNU Social, called Mastodon. Mastodon is an open-source server that integrates with other GNU Social (and other compatible) networks. The entire network is like an unlimited number of different Twitter websites, users of which can follow each other and interact regardless of which Twitter website exactly they are on. This has obvious benefits as there is no single company that has a monopoly.
Currently the only viable implementation of such a server is GNU Social itself. It is good, but difficult to install, and having a long legacy of different projects being merged, the codebase is harder to maintain. That is why I am working on Mastodon, a re-implementation using Ruby on Rails, with the ability to be quickly deployed on a new machine using Docker. The focus is also on a clean, modern and snappy user interface.
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The project can be followed on GitHub. A live version of Mastodon is also running on mastodon.social, and supporting this Patreon will help pay for its hosting.
