Review: mastodon.technology

If you’ve been wondering whether you should make a Mastodon account, the answer is, yes, you should. (If you haven’t been wondering, you might want to start here to read more about the project.) While Mastodon has more in common with Twitter than with Facebook, it is also entirely its own thing, a living, growing, decentralized community of humans building a new social network from the bottom up, on the basis of open standards like ActivityPub and free software like Mastodon itself.

mastodon.technology, in spite of the “official-sounding” name, is just one of many instances in the Mastodon network. It is indeed focused on techy/nerdy topics, though of course you can follow people on other instances as usual. There is a code of conduct which is quite sensible, and which is enforced through a shared blocklist. Operations are funded through a Patreon account. The server code is up-to-date.

Right now the operation of the instance very much seems like one person’s passion. The “About” page is short on technical details (backup policy, monitoring, etc.), and most of the tech stuff seems to be sitting on the personal Patreon account. To continue scaling past 10,000 users or so, it may be time to think a bit more about how to grow the administrative side of the community.

(Update: The instance was shut down in late 2022.)