About
Fill your social media feed with what matters to you.
vmst.io runs Mastodon which is powered by ActivityPub, which links to over ten-thousand independent communities (and growing) running Mastodon and other compatiable platforms to form a coherent network. Mastodon is built on open standards, using sustainable technologies (i.e. no blockchain) that have powered the web for decades.
FAQs
- Who's paying for this to exist?
- Can my company sign up?
- Who's running this place?
- Where are you hosted?
- Do you use AI or feed data to LLMs?
- How reliable is your service?
- Do you block (defederate) other servers?
- Do you block Threads?
- Do you block Bluesky?
- What clients do you support?
- Will you add my favorite custom emoji?
- Why don't we have quote posts?
ActivityPub Federation
ActivityPub is what makes social networks like Mastodon work across different servers, kind of like how email lets you message people regardless of whether they use Gmail or Outlook. When you're on one server (vmst.io) and want to follow someone on another, our server talks to their server to exchange information, just like postal services from different countries work together to deliver mail internationally.
Think of each server as a community center that keeps copies of messages for its members. When you post something, our server shares it with all the other servers where your followers are, and they show it to the right people. This means you can be on Server A and still see posts from your friend on Server B, even though you're in different places – the servers handle all the communication behind the scenes to make it feel seamless.
The actual process of delivering content between servers, often referred to as federation, isn't anywhere near as clean looking as the chart below might suggest, with 10,000 servers alone running Mastodon, and thousands of other servers running Pixelfed, Lemmy, Misskey, Akkoma, Gotosocial, micro.blog, Threads, Mbin and so much more.
vmst.io servers handle millions of these jobs per day.
