Decentralization as a hurdle: Mastodon now offers share button for websites
While share buttons for Mastodon already exist, there isn't an official one. That's now changing, and the microblogging service hopes for more visibility.
(Image: Marcelo Mollaretti/Shutterstock.com)
Mastodon now also offers a share button, which is intended to be easily integrated into a website so that content from there can be easily shared via the microblogging service. This was announced by founder Eugen Rochko, who is now working as a strategy and product consultant for Mastodon. Because Mastodon is decentralized and accounts can be created on many different servers, developing a share button is not as simple as with the competition. At the same time, there were already aids because Mastodon did not offer its own. Similar to the already available share buttons for Mastodon, with the developer's button, you have to select your instance once, after which sharing works intuitively. Those who have multiple accounts can also register all of them.
Buttons really only for sharing
Anyone who wants to offer a share button for Mastodon on a website will find a brief explanation in English at share.joinmastodon.org. Sharing is also handled via this page. However, this can be changed, Mastodon has made the entire source code available online on GitHub. Rochko assures that the tool runs in the browser, there are no tracking data, and no information is stored on the server. This fits Mastodon's data protection-sensitive approach and contradicts many competitors' share buttons. They used such buttons to observe internet users on external pages. Especially Facebook's approach has drawn criticism; the US company recently mothballed its external Like button.
The procedure for the new share button can be tried out directly via Rochko's blog post: the first click leads to a page where you can enter your Mastodon instance. Autocompletion of the URL helps with this. Afterward, there is a preview of the shared post. The next time you share from the same browser, you don't need to enter the instance. This works similarly to previous buttons, for example, on heise online. Rochko does not say that they should be replaced. He justifies Mastodon developing its own primarily by the fact that none of the alternatives have become “ubiquitous or easy to discover for website operators.” Whether the new button changes this remains to be seen.
Videos by heise
Mastodon, developed in Germany, is one of several microblogging services currently competing with X and aiming to benefit from more and more people leaving it. However, with less than 800,000 active accounts, Mastodon is significantly smaller than Meta's Threads; Bluesky is slightly larger with over 3 million. On the other hand, Mastodon is part of the so-called Fediverse: thanks to a common protocol as a basis, you can interact directly with accounts on completely different services. This means you can participate in debates on Reddit alternatives directly from Mastodon, for example. Furthermore, Mastodon's technology is much more open than that of classic social networks; various applications use it and add interesting functions.
(mho)
