Is Twitter dead?
Unless you have living under a rock for the past few days, you may already know that Twitter replaced the iconic bird logo with a letter X. The popular social network was bought by Elon Musk last year, and now he is radically re-branding a well established and very popular social network, used by millions of people. But this is not only a change in the name of the popular social network, Elon Musk's idea is to add a wide array of services to it, from video and audio to payments. The idea is to have a single platform from which you can do it all, hence the new name, the Twitter name is simply obsolete in this new era for the social network.
But not everyone has liked this change, which is seen by many as radical. So, what options do we have?, what are the alternatives to this, in the words of many disgruntled users, non-sense?
Enter Mastodon
Mastodon is a decentralized, open-source social media platform. It is designed as an alternative to centralized social networks like Twitter. Mastodon is very popular among privacy-conscious users, since you host it on your own servers.
I'm a huge fan of DigitalOcean, a cloud service provider. Their platform is very easy to use and prices are really competitive, compared to juggernauts like AWS and Azure. That's why I use it for all my web application needs. And now you can install Mastodon with just one click thanks to DigitalOcean! Keep reading if you are interested, but believe me, it's really simple to build your own Mastodon server.
Installing Mastodon on DigitalOcean (only for technical users!)
The following paragraphs are intended for technical users only, but if you are not one and still want to try it, let me know in the comments below if you need help setting this up.
NOTE: This is not intended to be a comprehensive guide for installing Mastodon on DigitalOcean, if you need more guidance on any of the steps below or if you get stuck, please follow the instructions on the official tutorial here:
NOTE 2: You need a domain for your mastodon instance. Be sure to have it ready when going through the setup.
If you don't already have a DigitalOcean account, create one now. Then navigate to the following page https://marketplace.digitalocean.com/apps/mastodon. Click the Create Mastodon Droplet, configure your Droplet settings according to your needs (tip: a Droplet is a virtual machine), and click Create Droplet.
You will have to wait for a bit for your droplet to get up and running.
After it's done, take note of the IP address to connect it to it using SSH to finish the setup:
ssh root@SERVER_IPFollow the on-screen prompts. When asked for your domain, enter the domain name without the "http/s", for example.
. . .
Booting Mastodon's first-time setup wizard...
Welcome to the Mastodon first-time setup!
Domain name: example.com
. . .After it's installed, go to your landing page at https://example.com to finish configuring your mastodon server. Congratulations, now you are running your own Mastodon server!
If you want to delve deeper into Mastodon, go to the official documentation to learn more about what you can with Mastodon.
And there you have it. What do you think about Mastodon? Have you used it before? Let us know in the comments below.
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