Everyday apps
European microblogging services
Short form posting on federated European networks
A microblogging service is built around short public posts: a few lines of text, an image, a link, sometimes a poll. Readers follow accounts rather than subscribe to pages, and posts travel through reposts and replies. The software in this category is federated, meaning independent servers exchange posts with each other, so accounts on different instances can follow and reply across them.
Federation changes the ownership question completely: with Mastodon or Pleroma, no single company holds the network, and you can pick a server run under European law or run your own. That makes a European alternative to X less about one vendor and more about choosing an operator you trust. Accounts can also be moved between instances, followers included, which limits the usual lock-in.
Mastodon
Open source federated microblogging network
Mastodon is an open source microblogging service built as a federated social network. Instead of one central company, anyone with the technical knowledge can run a server where people register, much like email providers. Servers talk to each other over the open ActivityPub protocol, so you can follow and interact with accounts hosted elsewhere.
Open sourceOpen source♻
