Social networking, back in your hands
The world’s largest free, open-source, decentralized microblogging network
Get started
As seen on
Find your perfect community
Mastodon isn’t one place and one set of rules: it’s thousands of unique, interconnected communities to choose from, filled with different people, interests, languages, and needs. Don’t like the rules? You’re free to join any community you like, or better yet: you can host your own, on your own terms!
Take control of your content
With powerful tools to control who sees your posts and a 500-character limit, Mastodon empowers you to share your ideas, unabridged. The best part? All posts are in chronological order, not “optimized” to push ads into your timeline. With apps for iOS, Android, and every other platform imaginable, Mastodon is always at your fingertips.
Putting the user first
You’re a person, not a product. Mastodon is a free, open-source development that has been crowdfunded, not financed. All instances are independently owned, operated, and moderated. There is no monopoly by a single commercial company, no ads, and no tracking. Mastodon works for you, and not the other way around.
Feel safe in your community
Mastodon comes with effective anti-abuse tools to help protect yourself from online abuse. With small, interconnected communities, it means that there are more moderators you can approach to help with a situation. This also means you can choose who sees your posts: friends, your community, or the entire fediverse.
Additional features
- Robust anti-abuse tools
- Flexible post filtering
- A huge audience
- Easily deploy your own
- They’re called toots
- Embed media in your posts
- Built on open web standards
- Spoiler warnings
- You decide what’s relevant
Sponsored by
Sign up
This is like picking an e-mail hosting provider, but more social since you'll see your neighbours. The domain will also be part of your username!
Install your own
If you are interested in running your own instance — for your friends, family or organization — you can get started by reading the installation documentation. You only host your own users and the content that they subscribe to.
Read the docsHow it works
Anyone can run a server of Mastodon. Each server hosts individual user accounts, the content they produce, and the content they subscribe to.
Each user account has a globally unique name (e.g. @user@example.com), consisting of the local username (@user), and the domain name of the server it is on (example.com).
Users can follow each other, regardless of where they’re hosted — when a local user follows a user from a different server, the server subscribes to that user’s updates for the first time.
Why is that cool?
Servers are run independently by different people and organizations. They can apply wildly different moderation policies, so you can find or make one that fits your taste perfectly. A decentralized network is harder for governments to censor. If one server goes bankrupt or starts acting unethically, the network persists so you never have to worry about migrating your friends and audience to a yet another platform again.
Sponsors
Mastodon is free, open-source software. There is no advertising, monetizing, or venture capital. Your donations directly support full-time development of the project.
Support on Patreon View sponsorsMastodon color scheme
#282c37
#9baec8
#d9e1e8
#2b90d9