Mastodon

Mastodon

About this app

Mastodon is the best way to keep up with what’s happening. Follow anyone across the fediverse and see it all in chronological order. No algorithms, ads, or clickbait in sight.

This is the official Android app for Mastodon. It is blazing fast and stunningly beautiful, designed to be not just powerful but also easy to use. In our app, you can:

EXPLORE

■ Discover new writers, journalists, artists, photographers, scientists and more
■ See what’s happening in the world

READ

■ Keep up with people you care about in a chronological feed with no interruptions
■ Follow hashtags to keep up with specific topics in real time

CREATE

■ Post to your followers or the whole world, with polls, high quality images and videos
■ Participate in interesting conversations with other people

CURATE

■ Create lists of people to never miss a post
■ Filter words or phrases to control what you do and don’t want to see

AND MORE!

■ A beautiful theme that adapts to your personalized color scheme, light or dark
■ Share and scan QR codes to quickly exchange Mastodon profiles with others
■ Login and switch between multiple accounts
■ Get notified when a specific person posts with the bell button
■ No spoilers! You can put your posts behind content warnings

A POWERFUL PUBLISHING PLATFORM

You no longer have to try and appease an opaque algorithm that decides if your friends are going to see what you posted. If they follow you, they’ll see it.

If you publish it to the open web, it’s accessible on the open web. You can safely share links to Mastodon in the knowledge that anyone will be able to read them without logging in.

Between threads, polls, high quality images, videos, audio, and content warnings, Mastodon offers plenty of ways to express yourself in a way that suits you.

A POWERFUL READING PLATFORM

We don’t need to show you ads, so we don’t need to keep you in our app. Mastodon has the richest selection of 3rd party apps and integrations so you can choose the experience that fits you best.

Thanks to the chronological home feed, it’s easy to tell when you’ve caught up on all updates and can move on to something else.

No need to worry that a misclick will ruin your recommendations forever. We don’t guess what you want to see, we let you control it.

PROTOCOLS, NOT PLATFORMS

Mastodon is not like a traditional social media platform, but is built on a decentralized protocol. You can sign up on our official server, or choose a 3rd party to host your data and moderate your experience.

Thanks to the common protocol, no matter what you choose, you can communicate seamlessly with people on other Mastodon servers. But there’s more: With just one account, you can communicate with people from other fediverse platforms.

Not happy with your choice? You can always switch to a different Mastodon server while taking your followers with you. For advanced users, you can even host your data on your own infrastructure, since Mastodon is open-source.

NON-PROFIT IN NATURE

Mastodon is a registered non-profit in the US and Germany. We are not motivated by extracting monetary value from the platform, but by what’s best for the platform.

AS FEATURED IN: TIME, Forbes, Wired, The Guardian, CNN, The Verge, TechCrunch, Financial Times, Gizmodo, PCMAG.com, and more.

Ratings and reviews

Works pretty much as expected, with one exception: there's no "local" option (letting you view the posts on your instance, regardless of whether you follow the posters or not). And weirdly, a bug was introduced with this most recent version (2023 May 17). Poll voting has an one-by-one error. If you vote for choice 4, it is choice 3 that's selected, vote for 3 and 2 is selected, and so on until 1, which selects 2.

Overall am impressed with the app. The UI was a little overwhelming at first and some things weren't clear how to get to - for example, the Explore and Search are combined so if you do a search you don't see Explore stuff again until you hit the back arrow on the search bar. After spending some time with it, most of what I would want in an app is already here. There are a few bugs that need polished, but dev seems to be responsive in fixing things as they're reported on github.

Can't navigate easily between instances like you can in Tusky. You have to sign in & out of each instance manually. Also, having so much of the user interface happening in-browser instead of in-app is awkward & not all the timelines are displayed. You have to minimize the browser pop-up to navigate back to the app each time. I'll stick with Tusky for the time being. Good to see y'all trying tho.

What’s new

- Settings are now split into global settings and account-specific settings for each account you're logged into
- Profiles now show who of the people you follow also follows this person
- More easily swap between posts, profiles and hashtags when using search
- We now tell you exactly how many followers you'd lose when blocking a whole server so you can avoid costly mistakes
- Bookmarks and favourites have moved to a new tab on your profile