Kibicat Mastodon

Kibicat Mastodon is a Mastodon‐compatible fediverse instance originally forked from Mastodon Glitch Edition (otherwise known as GlitchSoc). For an understanding of Mastodon and what it can do, see https://joinmastodon.org.

The goals of Kibicat Mastodon are as follows :—

• Community‐oriented design approach, sensitive to the needs of the 📟🐱 GlitchCat community.

• Increasing agency of users to make appropriate decisions through education and empowerment rather than mechanisms of control.

• Standards compliance with relevant specifications, to the extent possible within the Mastodon ecosystem.

• Readable, maintainable (in isolation, not necessarily as a fork) source code.

Its current priorities are the following :—

1. Increasing accessibility and usability of existing features of Mastodon.

2. Improving documentation and deployment pipelines for the Mastodon software, making our work easier to replicate.

3. Improving the extensibility, robustness, and interoperability of Mastodon; making the code less fragile and easier to maintain.

4. Developing new features our users need.

The following are not goals :—

• Contributing to or improving other Mastodon‐compatible softwares (including upstream Mastodon).

  • Rationale: Kibicat Mastodon is not extensively funded and has limited developer resources. We cannot afford to spend time packaging improvements for other, better‐funded implementations. Our work is AGPL‐licensed; others are welcome to spend their own time and resources adapting our improvements.

• Perpetually maintaining Kibicat Mastodon as a “soft” fork.

  • Rationale: Mastodon issues new releases extremely infrequently (a minor version every ∼6 mo). There may come a time when it is easier for us to simply port over new features twice a year than it is for us to maintain perpetual pull‐and‐merge compatibility. This said, for our own benefit, we will try to touch as little as we can in the process of meeting our goals.

Nomenclature

Kibicat [ˌkʰɪbiˈkʰæt] Mastodon is the name of the software. This name reflects the fact that it is a fork of, and compatible with, the Mastodon software developed by Mastodon gGmbH. (This name may change in the future if we decide that we no longer want to be associated with Mastodon gGmbH, or they decide they no longer want to be associated with us.)

Kibicat may be abbreviated 🄺🐱.

Kibicat Mastodon has been developed primarily for use on the 📟🐱 GlitchCat server, hosted at https://glitch.cat.family. The software is not called GlitchCat. The software is called Kibicat Mastodon.

Contributing/Documentation/Etcetera

Coming soon! In the meantime, contact @Lady@cat.family.

(For the most part, documentation applicable to upstream Mastodon is also applicable to Kibicat Mastodon.)