Cloudflare’s Wildebeest: The New Social Network in Town You Need to Know About

The federated network or Fediverse as everyone likes to call it has become the most intriguing and most discussed topic in recent times, especially for those who like exploring platforms like the Mastodon or wish to run their own servers. Cloudflare Inc introduced Wildebeest – an open-source, easy-to-deploy ActivityPub and Mastodon-compatible server built on Cloudflare’s Supercloud.

Now let’s address a few basic questions. What should a user do to join the Mastodon federated network and run her own server? What are the benefits of having your own server?

The foremost reason could be when you wish to have your own community with a common theme and attract users over the same. The next most obvious reason would be avoiding the need to trust a third-party server and going by their rules and policies. You want to be in total control over your personal data, content, and visibility.

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What is Mastodon?

Mastodon is a decentralized network that is an amalgamation of independent servers or communities (as they are commonly called) that have their own distinct theme or topics. Each of these is administered by its own community and has its own usage rules, however, it has access to the social network. With this, it can still be a part of the main Fredievrse.

The Mastodon gGmbH non-profit organization provides a server implementation using Ruby, Node.js, PostgreSQL, and Redis.

Users need to:

• Own or rent a server or VPS.
• Install and configure the software.
• Set up database and publics-facing web server.
• Configure and protect against any attack.

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Wildebeest – What User Can Do?

In many ways, the network is similar to the microblogging site, Twitter. Users can post short messages, attach pictures (videos to follow soon), and reply to each other.  The only difference is that, unlike the Fediverse, Twitter solely depends on one centralized service to distribute its messages.

• Users can publish, edit, boost, or delete posts.
• Edit profile information, avatar, and header image.
• You can follow anyone and vice versa.
• Search content.
• Register one or multiple accounts under your instance.
• Email-based authentication or any Cloudflare Access compatible IdP, like GitHub or Google.
• Users can refer to the simple read-only web interface to explore the timelines and user profiles.

Wildebeest – New Features Over Time

As Wildebeest is open-sourced, there will be continuous changes, and new features as any user extend and improvise it. Currently, Wildebeest is not a managed server and it merely supports the following:

• ActivityPub, WebFinger, NodeInfo, WebPush, and Mastodon-compatible APIs. Wildebeest is capable of connecting to or receiving connections from other Fediverse servers.
• It is compatible with Mastodon web (like pinafore), desktop, and mobile clients. Wildebeest

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The announcement further stated that Wildebeest is a minimally viable Mastodon-compatible server and it will keep improving with more features over time. Users are more than welcome to contribute with pull requests or feedback.

To test the waters, Cloudflare’s tutorial Wildebeest GitHub gives a head-up to potential server operators, hobbyists, and tech aficionados to understand what the hype is about.