Mastodon on your website.

Every Mastodon user lives on a specific instance: a server running the open-source Mastodon software (or a compatible alternative like Pleroma, Akkoma, or GoToSocial). Examples include mastodon.social (the flagship instance run by the Mastodon nonprofit), fosstodon.org (free and open source software focus), hachyderm.io (tech industry), infosec.exchange (security professionals), mas.to (general purpose), and tens of thousands of smaller instances. A handle like @[email protected] tells the world your username and which server hosts your account. Each instance has its own moderation rules, its own API endpoint at instance.tld/api/v1/, and its own community norms. There is no central Mastodon API to call. A widget that wants to embed a Mastodon feed must resolve the instance from the handle and talk directly to that server. Poper does this automatically: paste any handle and the widget hits the right instance API, caches the response at our CDN edge, and renders posts with the same fidelity as the official Mastodon web client.

ActivityPub is the W3C-standard protocol that lets independent Mastodon instances talk to each other. When you follow someone on a different instance, your home server fetches their posts via ActivityPub. When you boost (Mastodon's equivalent of retweet), the boost propagates to every instance that has seen the original post. This federation is why a profile on one instance can still reach readers across the Fediverse, even though each server is independently operated. ActivityPub support extends beyond Mastodon: Pleroma, Akkoma, Misskey, Pixelfed (federated Instagram), PeerTube (federated YouTube), Lemmy (federated Reddit), and even Threads (Meta announced ActivityPub support in 2024) all speak the same protocol. Poper keeps the widget source clear by connecting one Mastodon account per widget, reading that account's public posts, rendering the post text, attached media and engagement counts, and sorting everything newest-first.

Mastodon posts run to a 500-character default, well past Twitter's 280, and many instances raise the limit further. Mastodon culture also leans heavily on content warnings, where users wrap sensitive topics so readers choose whether to expand. Both facts matter when you pick a feed widget. A widget built for short Twitter-style posts will truncate the longer Mastodon text and break the read. Poper's layouts render the full post text and attached media, and each post opens in a click-to-expand popup so visitors can read the whole thing without leaving your page. Because each widget pulls one specific account rather than an unfiltered firehose, you control which content lands on your site by choosing the source: embed your own account, a project handle, or a newsroom profile. If you want to show multiple Mastodon accounts, create separate widgets and place each feed where that account's updates are relevant.

Between October 2022 (Elon Musk's Twitter acquisition) and early 2024, Mastodon grew from roughly 300,000 monthly active users to over 1 million. The migration was driven by journalists, academics, open-source maintainers, security researchers, and privacy-focused brands who decided centralized platforms were no longer reliable hosts for public discourse. Major moves included: NPR and BBC public-broadcast accounts, government accounts (the EU has multiple instances for its institutions), academic researchers (academia.exchange, mathstodon.xyz, and dozens of discipline-specific instances), open-source projects (the GNOME, Krita, and KDE projects all maintain official Mastodon presences), and privacy-conscious media organizations. For these brands, embedding a Mastodon feed on the marketing site or docs page is a statement: your public communications happen on an open protocol, not a walled garden, and your readers can engage without creating accounts on platforms they distrust. The widget makes that statement loud and visible.

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