Mastodon is a free, open-source social network server based on ActivityPub where users can follow friends and discover new ones. On Mastodon, users can publish anything they want: links, pictures, text, video. All Mastodon servers are interoperable as a federated network (users on one server can seamlessly communicate with users from another one, including non-Mastodon software that implements ActivityPub!)

Click below to learn more in a video:

Navigation

• Project homepage 🐘
• Support the development via Patreon
• View sponsors
• Blog
• Documentation
• Roadmap
• Official Docker image
• Browse Mastodon servers
• Browse Mastodon apps

Features

No vendor lock-in: Fully interoperable with any conforming platform

It doesn't have to be Mastodon; whatever implements ActivityPub is part of the social network! Learn more

Real-time, chronological timeline updates

Updates of people you're following appear in real-time in the UI via WebSockets. There's a firehose view as well!

Media attachments like images and short videos

Upload and view images and WebM/MP4 videos attached to the updates. Videos with no audio track are treated like GIFs; normal videos loop continuously!

Safety and moderation tools

Mastodon includes private posts, locked accounts, phrase filtering, muting, blocking and all sorts of other features, along with a reporting and moderation system. Learn more

OAuth2 and a straightforward REST API

Mastodon acts as an OAuth2 provider, so 3rd party apps can use the REST and Streaming APIs. This results in a rich app ecosystem with a lot of choices!

Deployment

Tech stack:

• Ruby on Rails powers the REST API and other web pages
• React.js and Redux are used for the dynamic parts of the interface
• Node.js powers the streaming API

Requirements:

• PostgreSQL 9.5+
• Redis 4+
• Ruby 2.7+
• Node.js 14+

The repository includes deployment configurations for Docker and docker-compose as well as specific platforms like Heroku, Scalingo, and Nanobox. For Helm charts, reference the mastodon/chart repository. The standalone installation guide is available in the documentation.

A Vagrant configuration is included for development purposes. To use it, complete following steps:

• Install Vagrant and Virtualbox
• Install the vagrant-hostsupdater plugin: vagrant plugin install vagrant-hostsupdater
• Run vagrant up
• Run vagrant ssh -c "cd /vagrant && foreman start"
• Open http://mastodon.local in your browser

To set up MacOS for native development, complete the following steps:

• Install the latest stable Ruby version (use a ruby version manager for easy installation and management of ruby versions)
• Run brew install postgresql@14
• Run brew install redis
• Run brew install imagemagick
• Install Foreman or a similar tool (such as overmind) to handle multiple process launching.
• Navigate to Mastodon's root directory and run brew install nvm then nvm use to use the version from .nvmrc
• Run corepack enable && yarn set version classic
• Run bundle exec rails db:setup (optionally prepend RAILS_ENV=development to target the dev environment)
• Finally, run overmind start -f Procfile.dev

Getting Started with GitHub Codespaces

To get started, create a codespace for this repository by clicking this 👇

A codespace will open in a web-based version of Visual Studio Code. The dev container is fully configured with software needed for this project.

Note: Dev containers is an open spec which is supported by GitHub Codespaces and other tools.

Contributing

Mastodon is free, open-source software licensed under AGPLv3.

You can open issues for bugs you've found or features you think are missing. You can also submit pull requests to this repository or submit translations using Crowdin. To get started, take a look at CONTRIBUTING.md. If your contributions are accepted into Mastodon, you can request to be paid through our OpenCollective.

IRC channel: #mastodon on irc.libera.chat

License

Copyright (C) 2016-2022 Eugen Rochko & other Mastodon contributors (see AUTHORS.md)

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU Affero General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU Affero General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU Affero General Public License along with this program. If not, see https://www.gnu.org/licenses/.