Mastodon App

About

Mastodon is an open source decentralized social network - by the people for the people. Join the federation and take back control of your social media!

Questions? Ask in the Cloudron Forum - Mastodon
Mastodon Website
Mastodon issue tracker

Admin

To make a user an administrator, use the Web Terminal and run the following command:

    bin/tootctl accounts modify <username> --role admin

Adding users

When used with Cloudron authentication, simply add new users to the Cloudron dashboard.

Without Cloudron authentication, new users can be added using the CLI:

    bin/tootctl accounts create testusername --email=test@cloudron.io

Registration

Registration is closed by default. To enable, login to Mastodon as an admin and change the "Registration mode" under Administration -> Site Settings.

Federation

Cloudron will setup Mastodon accounts to be of the form username@social.example.org when you install Mastodon at social.example.org. This domain is called the LOCAL_DOMAIN in Mastodon terminology.

Changing the LOCAL_DOMAIN will let you have handles as username@example.org even when installed at social.example.org Changing the LOCAL_DOMAIN is not recommended since it is complicated and in most cases unnecessary. This is because Mastodon account names are not intended to be remembered like usernames (it's not like email where you can start following another account). Instead, users usually visit a website and click the 'Follow' button.

If you decide to not change the LOCAL_DOMAIN, no further configuration is required and your Mastodon instance is already set up for federation.

Changing LOCAL_DOMAIN

You can change the account domain name by using the File Manager and changing LOCAL_DOMAIN in /app/data/env.production. After that, you have to configure LOCAL_DOMAIN's web server to serve up .well-known/host-meta query.

If LOCAL_DOMAIN is an app on Cloudron, you can use Cloudron's Well Known URI support. Go to the Domains view and set the Mastodon domain in the Advanced settings:

If the LOCAL_DOMAIN is NOT hosted on Cloudron, you must figure out a suitable way to serve up the well-known documents. Here are some hints:

For WordPress, you can setup a redirect using Redirection plugin
For Ghost,you can add a redirects.json
For Surfer, simply upload the XML above into .well-known/host-meta.
For anything else, setup nginx config as follows:

location = /.well-known/host-meta {
       return 301 https://social.example.org$request_uri;
}

Following users

To follow external users, visit their mastodon account and click on 'Follow'. This will popup a window asking your mastodon identity (which will be username@LOCAL_DOMAIN).

If you have an existing account on another server, you can bring those connections with you to your own server. For this, go to Settings -> Data Export and download your following list as a CSV file, and finally on your own server, you go to Settings -> Import and upload that file.

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