Mastodon & Pixelfed, open source and federated
Twitter's open source replacements of the future
So with the immense amount of talk about yeeting away from twitter because of ElonMusk I have finally taken the time to look into some of the other cool alternatives that exist.
A couple cool ones are {{< fa fa="fab fa-mastodon" >}}Mastadon and Pixelfed.
Mastadon is a direct replacement for Twitter
It has Favourites(Likes) and Boosts(Retweets), Polls, Unlisted and Follower only posts, Built in drawing... for some reason and it even has it's own "tweetdeck"
Mastadon is Open Source and Federated and Decentralised. A lot of Decentralised things in 2022 use Crypto which really isn't a great experience, Mastodon servers just run on the normal internet without any ties to Crypto or NFTs which means no hexagonal profiles.
Even though it is Decentralised you can access all other communities from whatever instance you sign up on.
Mastodon's official video explaining the platform very clearly and cutely: {{< fa fa="fab fa-youtube" >}}
Learn more about mastodon and see a list of different communities here: joinmastodon.org
You can sign up for the official instance here: mstdn.social
Pixelfed; Instagram but with Twitter's features
Next we have Pixelfed which is more like a mix of Twitter and Instagram with the same concepts as Mastadon, federated, open source and decentralised, But with a focus on Photos and images even providing an option to choose the license you want for your images when you post them.
Pixelfed is a lot less used then Mastadon but it is still a very nice platform if your primary content is images. Both Mastadon and Pixelfed can communicate with each other because they use the same protocol so you can follow Mastadon accounts on Pixelfed and vice versa.
Learn more about mastodon and see a list of different communities here: pixelfed.org
You can sign up for the official instance[here: pixelfed.social
Extras
an amazing video explaining Distributed social media and federation: {{< fa fa="fab fa-youtube" >}}
links to my own profiles that I made while researching these platforms:
The Twitter thread
This post actually stared out as a Twitter thread I made, it is my longest Twitter thread to date and I wrote it over a couple hours while I was looking into these platforms for myself.
So with the immense amount of talk about yeeting away from twitter because of #ElonMusk I have finally taken the time to look into some of the other cool alternatives that exist.
— [email protected] (@OwenQuinlan7) April 26, 2022
A couple cool ones are #Mastadon and #Pixelfed. 1/11
For some reason while converting this post for my website I made major changes to my site; Added AwesomeFont icons, Created 4 custom HUGO short codes, Fixed the social icons in the bottom left, modified how the template embeds links for socials so I can verify that I own this website on Mastodon. I tend to go a little overboard I guess