Show HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13303346

Recent article discussing it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14034674

also: http://www.theverge.com/2017/4/4/15177856/mastodon-social-ne...

and: http://mashable.com/2017/04/04/mastodon-twitter-social-netwo...

and: https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/mastodon-is-like-...

I've just signed up for this, I love the idea!

I wish I could understand from the readme if this is somehow P2P or if it requires a server or even mapping a domain in DNS. They state it avoids the problems of centralized solutions without saying how that happens for a layman.

It's federated: There can be many servers run by different people, and you can communicate with/follow/... people across servers with an account on any of them. (initially you only see what people post on the "home" server your account is on, but if someone on it follows somebody on another one, the server starts pulling what they write in)

And then is that remote user seen by all by default? Seems like most users would never be aware of other modes even if a few folks add remote users for their own consumption

Yes, there is a "federated timeline" that shows all messages the server knows about, from all sources.

Yeah, they should use emails to explain it. Emails are federated and everyone understands it. Somehow because this is new it looks harder to understand.

Has anyone here actually used this?

I signed up yesterday. Looks like Twitter but is decentralized like Email. There are already a lot of people there (~56k [1]), Brendan Eich for example [2] and it seems to grow fast. Hope this works out. Would be a great way to move away from the social platform silos Tim Berners-Lee mentioned.[3]

[1]https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/000/16... [2]https://mastodon.social/@BrendanEich [3]https://www.technologyreview.com/s/604052/webs-inventor-tim-...

I am, it's mostly a technical audience right now, but a couple of journalists and popular icons are joining.

Dan Harmon (Community, Rick and Morty) https://mastodon.social/@danharmon Grahan Linehan (IT Crowd) https://mastodon.social/@glinner

Plus a few french youtube icons and FOSS people as well. There's a big LGBT community

Also, I'm here: https://mastodon.xyz/@alexduf

Where are the requirements/features of this system documented?

do you mean hardware requirements?

Features are... the same as twitter, but on a federated network instead of a centralised one