How does this platform work?
Links.potsda.mn is built on mastodon and therefore part of the fediverse. You can read more about these terms below, but first in short what this means for you:
- Links.potsda.mn is moderated and shaped completely by us.
- We do not sell your data and will never do so.
- There are no ads and no business model behind Links.potsda.mn. We do this, because we think having this digital space is important and not because we want to make money with it. Neither now nor in the future.
- If you have an account on here, you can interact with million users worldwide, as if they were part of Links.potsda.mn themselves.
- If you publish content to this platform, you can decide, whether only a small group of people or the whole world can read it.
Mastodon
Mastodon is the software that makes Links.potsda.mn possible and is a self-hosted social networking service. Self-hosted means here: In contrast to the companies behind other social networks, development and operation (hosting) do not have to be practised by the same people. Mastodon is developed by a team of hundreds of volunteers. But it is provided by thousands of groups and individuals on the whole world, who run their own servers, so called instances.
As you can see, we are only one of many Mastodon instances. Because the developers put much work into the software mastodon, we can provide a polished service even with limited resources.
But we do not only profit from the software quality; the separate Mastodon instances communicate with each other. This is, from Links.potsda.mn you can currently interact with more than four million people worldwide.
But there are limits: Most of these people do not appear in our federated timeline, because there instances did not yet exchange data with Links.potsda.mn. And we simply block some instances. Because we do not want our digital space to be crocked up by fascists or right-wing trolls.
Fediverse
So there are thousands of Mastodon instances. But there is even more to the fediverse. Other software projects exist, which speak the same “Language” as the Mastodon instances. Some projects are older than Mastodon, others arose in the last months. All these services and their connections build the fediverse, a global network of platforms.
It would break the frame, to give examples for the other services, but you can find an incomplete list in the wikipedia article on the topic.
This guide is incomplete. Feel free to give feedback, either to @kollektiv@links.potsda.mn or via mail.