Mastodon is a free and open-source social networking platform that works very differently from large centralized social media websites. Instead of one company controlling the whole network, Mastodon is made up of many independent servers, often called instances, which can still communicate with each other through federation. This creates a more decentralized social web where communities can set their own rules and moderation policies.
One of the main reasons people are interested in Mastodon is that it gives users and administrators more control. A person can join a public instance that matches their interests, or even run their own server on their own domain. This makes Mastodon attractive to people who care about privacy, open standards, and independence from large platforms.
Mastodon is part of the broader Fediverse, a network of federated platforms that can talk to each other using protocols such as ActivityPub. That means a user on one server can still follow and interact with users on many other servers, even if they are hosted elsewhere. In practice, this combines the community feeling of smaller spaces with the reach of a larger network.
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