Mastodon: Federated Social Network with Eugen Rochko

Social networks can make you feel connected to a global society. But those social networks are controlled by a corporate entity. The profit motivations of the corporation are not directly aligned with the experience of the users.

Mastodon is an open source, decentralized social network. Eugen Rochko started building Mastodon in response to his dissatisfaction with centralized social networks like Facebook and Twitter. In the Mastodon model, users can run their own nodes, and other users can connect to them. You can follow users whose accounts reside in other nodes.

Eugen joins the show to discuss how Mastodon works, and how its thousands of users interact on the platform. We explore the open source community that is building Mastodon, and speculate on the future of social networks.

Transcript

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