You’ve probably heard of Mastodon, the open source alternative to X. Mastodon consists of thousands of independent servers, all together these servers form a social network Big Tech has nothing to do with. Open Source! That’s right up our alley, so of course Joomla has its own Mastodon server, joomla.social. JCM interviews Harald Leithner, who played a big part in making this happen. 

Could you tell us what Mastodon is?

Mastodon is free and open-source software in the same spirit as Joomla, for running self-hosted federated social networking services. 

It has microblogging features similar to X, which are offered by a large number of independent persons and organizations (known as instances but the better term would be communities), each with its own code of conduct, terms of service, privacy policy, privacy options, and content moderation policies. Mastodon is powered by the ActivityPub protocol, making it part of the Fediverse.

In what ways is it different from other social media?

Compared to X, Facebook, Instagram, you name it, it is not controlled by one company, it is a distributed federated social network with about 9.000 to 16.000 independent servers (communities) and 15 million users.

What do you like most about it?

Independence of big techs, like Joomla; you can just download it, set it up and do your own thing and still interact with all other people in the Fediverse or use it as an internal social network. Your software, your choice, no limitations.

So Joomla has its own Mastodon server now. How hard was it to make this happen? Could you take us through the process?

“Now”, is a bit relative, we started the first instance as social.joomla.org (@joom.la) in Dezember 2022. The reason for this was, as by many other instances, the changes on Twitter.

Setting up the server wasn’t too hard, more important was to create some basic rules and finding people to help with moderation. After a while, Brian Mitchell offered us the joomla.social domain. Changing the domain is not really intended in Mastodon. After a couple of tries with not much success, we decided to drop our old instance and create a new one. Sadly the database on social.joomla.org has a corruption which prevents us from providing proper redirects to the new instance. Long story short: setting up the new instance of the new domain was a straightforward task. The old instance has been shut down on July 31, 2024.

Who's responsible for keepng it going?

There’s a Working Group (in the making at the moment of writing). Volunteers in this group are Llewellyn van der Merwe, Niko Winckel, Martin Kopp and me. 

Can anyone join joomla.social or do you have to be an active member of the Joomla Community?

At this time we will ask you why you want to join so we have a kind of control over who is joining and being part of the community. Any context to Joomla would be enough. It doesn’t matter if you are just interested in Joomla and have one or no website or just like to talk about the CMS and ecosystem around it.

Do you have tips for readers who want to make the most of Mastodon?

At this time I try to post daily at @This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. about things I’m doing or are interesting from my point of view. @This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. and @This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. have some activity, The official accounts like @This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. or @This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. are always a good idea to follow. Our upcoming Joomla! Day D-A-CH is an active Mastodon account @This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Is there anything else I should have asked?

Good question, not really at this time, maybe if people like to have some automatic announcement (bots) on our instance for joomla release, or pull requests, or something like that.

That sounds interesting. What other interesting features can you imagine for Joomla on Mastodon?

As always the question should be more: what can the community bring to Mastodon?

Note from the author: OK people, you've heard the man. It would be great if we - the community - could pust Joomla forward on or through Mastodon. Have you got ideas for that? Great! If it's something you can do by yourself: what are you waiting for? If you need other people to make it happen, find someone from the working group on Mastodon or Mattermost.