Mastodon - social microblogging service
Name
Purpose
We should eat our own dog food. Mastodon is a FOSS alternative to Twitter
Summary of your evaluation
In my limited experience with it, it seems to work well. There's not much more to say about it.
Description
Wikipeida describes Mastodon as
"a free and open-source self-hosted social networking service ... on server nodes ... connected as a federated social network"
Pros and cons
Pros
- open source
- distributed / federated
- individual nodes can be more "focused" / special interest, improving the signal to noise ratio
Cons
- adoption not even close to Twitter. So, for getting the message out to the widest audience, Twitter is still king.
Indications of maturity level
Although it's technically only four years old, it is part of the "fediverse" which was born in 2008. Much of the fediverse uses the W3C ActivityPub protocol, presented in 2018.
The rest of the applications and services offered by the fediverse are also worth a gander -- and perhaps even a goose.