I first heard about Mastodon last week while lurking on Twitter. For those who don’t know, Mastodon is a free, open source, decentralized social network with instances run mostly by individuals.
Recently Manton Reece has been talking a lot about microblogging in an open web world using RSS. He has touched on points that are important to me, specifically content ownership. Like many people I post regularly to App.net, Facebook, Twitter, and other social networks, but I’ve always had one big problem with these networks. My micro-posts do not appear on my web site, and if these networks were to disappear in the future, then my content disappears too.