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Frequently Asked Questions
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#### What is a Mastodon?
A prehistoric animal, predecessor of the mammoth.
#### Why the name Mastodon?
There's a progressive metal band with the same name that I'm a fan of that brought the animal to my attention. I thought it's a pretty cool name/animal.
#### How exactly is it decentralized?
There are different ways in which something can be decentralized; in this case, Mastodon is the "federated" kind. Think e-mail, not BitTorrent. There are different servers (instances), users have an account on one of them, but can interact and follow each other regardless of where their account is.
#### Technically, how does the federation work?
We are using the OStatus suite of protocols:
1. Webfinger for user-on-domain lookup
2. Atom feeds with ActivityStreams, Portable Contacts, Threads extensions for the actual content
3. PubSubHubbub for subscribing to Atom feeds
4. Salmon for delivering certain items from the Atom feeds to interested parties such as the mentioned user, author of the status being replied to, person being followed, etc
#### What is mastodon.social?
The "flagship" instance of Mastodon, aka the server I run myself with the latest code. It's not supposed to be the only instance in the end.
#### What else is part of the federated network?
Let's call it the "fediverse". It has existed for a longer while, populated by GNU social servers, Friendica, Hubzilla, Diaspora etc. Not every one of those servers is fully compatible with every other. Mastodon strives to be fully standards-compliant and compatibility with GNU social is higher in priority than the others.