The 1st Official Application of Decentralized Social Media Network Mastodon Will Come Online This Summer, with Sujitech, LLC Providing Technical Support.
The decentralized social media network — Mastodon has officially announced the launch of its official application, with Sujitech, LLC offering technical development assistance and Lickability working on UX design. Eugen Rochiko, the main developer of Mastodon, has finished the concept design of the basic functions and on February 9, 2021, construction will formally begin. The basic feature implementation on the iOS platform will be completed first, and the iOS version is scheduled to be released in the summer of 2021.
With more than 4.4 million users, Mastodon is a decentralized social media network built on the ActivityPub Protocol. Though its user interface and form of interaction are equivalent to Twitter’s, it is quite different from Twitter in the sense that it is run by a number of independent operators using a federated approach to exchange data, creating a decentralized social network. In addition, Mastodon uses API optimization. While some third-party clients for Mastodon do exist in the market, Mastodon has not yet released its official application, which greatly affects its user experience. Therefore, Eugen aims to develop an official application for Mastodon to help potential people start using Mastodon and increase the customer base of its third-party apps.
As the subsidiary of Dimension, Sujitech, LLC is a tech startup that has a strong belief in the open-source ecosystem and is dedicated to providing users with access to a decentralized world. Beyond self-developed products such as Mask Network and TesserPG, the team has been responsible for managing the biggest third-party Twitter app, Twidere, which has more than 500,000 downloads so far.
Sujitech, LLC has close ties with Mastodon since long. Sujitech took over the maintenance of two major instances for Mastodon, Mstdn.jp, and Mastodon.cloud in June 2020. These two instances, with more than 300,000 users in total, are the third and fifth largest instances in Mastodon ecosystem, respectively, as well as long-time supporters of Fediverse.
Discussions of decentralized social media have been growing steadily in the internet industry in the past two years, and more and more people are beginning to put their sights on decentralized social network. Jack Dorsey, the founder of Twitter, has also openly endorsed the idea of decentralization. In 2019, Jack Dorsey announced that Twitter had been funding the development of a decentralized social media protocol called Bluesky, which seeks to help social media discover an open-source and decentralized standard that will decentralize the immense influence presently retained by centralized social media networks.
There have been numerous initiatives attempting to create decentralized social media networks prior to the announcement of the Bluesky proposal, and ActivityPub is the biggest of them.
For alternatives to conventional social media sites, this protocol has become an essential infrastructure. Mastodon is currently the most popular ActivityPub site.
At the beginning of 2021, Bluesky has published an article named “Ecosystem Review”. And we have launched a bounty with Fat Garage to translate it and hope we can spread it out.
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Sujitech, LLC is very honoured to be an active part of Mastodon and has formed a highly aligned consensus with Eugen, the founder of Mastodon. The team has been fully committed to the development of Mastodon’s first official application on iOS platform. We hope that through our efforts, and those of our partners, we can accelerate the emergence of a vibrant decentralized Web 3.0 ecosystem, pulling billions of users to the next stage of the Internet.
