Frequently asked questions

Newsmast is a small, non-profit organisation with a big goal: harnessing the power of social media for good. Powered by Mastodon, we’re curating content from around the Fediverse into communities of interest, centred on topics that matter. We’re pulling together news and comment in safe, global communities led by people who know their stuff.

The creation of Newsmast was inspired by the emergence of an incredible online community of news and comment following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and the direction of Twitter under Elon Musk. The growing gap between the two led to our vision to build a microblogging service around communities of interest, with a charitable structure, free of advertising. The emergence of Mastodon as a credible alternative to Twitter gave us the platform we needed to deliver this vision.

We’re a very small team working hard to bring to life a vision of social media which helps us all. To see more about the people behind Newsmast, you can check out our Meet the Team page.

When we first launched, we were backed by a generous donation from one of our co-founders. That helped us find our feet and hire a small team to kickstart the project. Now we’re further along, we’re reaching out to potential funders, other organisations working along similar lines and - most importantly - smaller donations from people who like what we’re doing and want to help us develop further!

The Newsmast Foundation is a UK registered charity (no. 1205953). The foundation owns and supports the Newsmast app and project, bringing knowledge-media to life.

Newsmast is a non-profit, owned by a charitable foundation. Any money made by Newsmast is used to cover costs and enable us to grow. We're asking users to make donations to support us - ideally on a monthly basis. In the future, our ambition is to help creators by upgrading user profiles so that they can include a link to their preferred monetisation, tip or donation platform.

Newsmast is part of the decentralised social network powered by Mastodon. It runs on Mastodon's open-source technology which is proven, scalable, and developed by a non-profit. We've also made a few changes ourselves. You can find our federated server at newsmast.social. Our web app is available on desktop at newsmast.org to browse or you can download the PWA, for mobiles it’s on the App Store and Google Play. A full breakdown of the tech behind Newsmast is available on our GitHub repository: https://github.com/newsmast22/mammoth

Mastodon is a decentralised social media network meaning it is made up of thousands of independent servers, which can be created by anyone and are often organised by shared interest. Some can have thousands of users, others just the person who built it. Newsmast is built on Mastodon, we have our own server and interact with other servers in the network (known as “federating”) to share a combined pool of posts. Posts from across other servers appear in our communities and drive conversation within Newsmast on our mobile apps and at newsmast.org. Engagement works both ways, so you can follow users from other Mastodon servers and they can follow you.

Newsmast runs a Mastodon server (newsmast.social) which is where all of the Newsmast accounts are created, meaning that all Newsmast accounts are accessible via Mastodon and its clients. But our server is customised with bespoke timelines, and few other extras. To get the full experience, you need to visit our app with its custom user interface and 62 Communities. We've recently upgraded our app so that any Mastodon account can use Newsmast without having to create a new account on our server.

Newsmast is social media reimagined. By using Newsmast you’re supporting a non-profit dedicated to furthering our knowledge sharing connections online, instead of a corporation who wants to control what you see to raise their profits. We’re held accountable by our board of trustees and the UK Charity Commission, ensuring we never stray from our mission. You’ll also be a part of communities discussing and collaborating on all areas of life and the world's greatest challenges. At their heart are hand curated timelines of news, comment and analysis. We’re cutting out the noise, spam, and darker corners of the internet to put you in a room with the experts. We then work to share your contributions with the widest possible audience, helping the discussion grow, whilst actively giving platform to marginalised voices too. To make all of this possible, we’ve built an easy-to-use app which brings together and organises the best posts on the topics that matter, entirely ad-free. We’re a small team, but we’re friendly and work hard to ensure everyone feels safe and comfortable on Newsmast. We want everyone to have the best experience possible, so we’ve built ways to help you network with the wider Fediverse and are always on hand to give you tips or support if you need it. When using Newsmast, you’ll be able to feel at ease knowing you're not funding a billionaire, you’re helping others learn by sharing your knowledge and news, you’re kept safe by filters to stop the bad bits seeping through, and there’s a small team always ready to help.

Newsmast Communities can be followed on any Fediverse app by following the Community Feed at newsmast.community. To get the full Newsmast experience you can download Newsmast as an app on iOS or Android phones. Newsmast can also run as a progressive web app (PWA) on your mobile browser, tablet or desktop. If you’d like to download the PWA, go to newsmast.org, click on the share symbol and select ‘Add to Desktop’. Then click on the icon and follow the sign-up process.

Your data is yours. Any cookies you encounter on the foundation website or Newsmast are essential cookies to abide by international regulations and ensure the smooth running of our products. For more information, check out our Cookie Policy. Unlike most social media organisations, we will never sell any of your data. The only records we keep are the information relating to your Newsmast account, such as the email you signed up with. We don’t even ask for your name. For more information, check out our Privacy Policy.

Just join a few communities that interest you and start exploring! If you see someone posting stuff you like, follow them and start building your own community.

You can report the post in the app by clicking on the three dots in the bottom right or get in touch with our team and we’ll be happy to help! Just provide details of what you saw and who posted it to support@newsmast.org, the more info you can give us the easier it is for us to solve the problem.

We have a set of Community Guidelines that users follow. When the guidelines are broken, our human team assesses the situation and takes proportionate action. We also take preemptive steps by blocking and muting specific domains and accounts which breach these guidelines. We use the Oliphant.Social Tier 0 blocklist, with a few additions implemented by our team to keep things safe and respectful. By default, we also filter all communities to only display SFW content. Each community has specific community level filters too, to keep things on topic. Filters are regularly monitored at all levels. Users can moderate content themselves by muting or blocking accounts - or report more serious breaches to our moderators. If you want to join our moderation team, get in touch at support@newsmast.org.

Newsmast Community Feeds are a key part of our mission to promote peer to peer knowledge sharing, helping people see curated topical knowledge across the Fediverse - whether they’re a part of Newsmast or not! Our feeds only post unlisted boosts, so you won’t see them if you don’t follow them. Our community feeds have their own server, newsmast.community which tells you more about what they’re for, how they’re made and how to use them.

We want our communities to be places for intelligent discussion and knowledge sharing. Bots often don’t assist in achieving this goal. However, when marked appropriately, we know bots on the Fediverse can provide interesting and meaningful information. Full details of our bot policy can be found in the Community Guidelines.

We don’t want to control what people on the Fediverse see, or make it so people can only see what we suggest. Instead, we wanted to provide a tool to help with exploration and discovery on Mastodon and in the Fediverse, alongside everything else that already exists. On our apps and using our feeds, community content can be seen alongside Home timelines and lists. We curate all the content making its way onto our community feeds using a mixture of follows, filters, mutes and hashtags. Our curation is focussed on two areas. First, upholding our and Mastodon’s content guidelines by excluding harmful and hateful material. Second, identifying relevant posts and contributors that drive conversations forward, and screening out the clutter. We add experts who are particularly insightful to the community’s For You timeline, where they appear alongside the people you follow. Our ambition is to foster and grow online communities and better conversations first by bringing existing communities and individuals on the Fediverse together, and by making it easier for people new to the Fediverse to get started.

We’ve brought together experts and interesting voices on a variety of topics in our Newsmast communities. These federated spaces are built to encourage the sharing of knowledge from person to person, helping all the best takes from across the Fediverse appear in one place. If we follow you, or boost your posts, it’s because your posts add something to one or more of our communities and we’re sharing them with others who are interested! Your posts then appear in the communities on our app and across the wider fediverse thanks to our newsmast.community feeds. We want to join the threads and get more people engaging with you and what you know. If you don’t want our community feeds to share your content with the Fediverse, you can mute them individually or exclude them from a list. If this isn’t enough, and you’d rather keep what you’re saying in your own space, let us know and we’ll remove you from the Newsmast communities completely.

Yes we’ve updated our GitHub so anyone can see what’s going on behind the scenes at Newsmast. You can see our repository here: https://github.com/newsmast22/mammoth

We’d love the opportunity to work with other Fediverse developers, expanding our mission outside of Newsmast and onto other Fediverse platforms or servers. To help achieve it, we've launched our API to help other developers build Communities into their projects. If you're a developer and want to get in touch, feel free reach out to our API Lead Elliott at elliott@newsmastfoundation.org.

The plug-in server is the idea that using Newsmast (or a modified Mastodon client) you can have your home Mastodon server and plug-in an additional one without creating a new account. So, all the interactions go out from your normal account, but you can easily switch between your home timeline (eg. Mastodon.social) and another server's timeline. At Newsmast, you can see this by logging into our app with your Mastodon account. From there you can see all of the content on the Newsmast server, as if you are a part of it, but any interactions will come from your home server account. Our goal is to support other Fediverse developers to create versions of this system which can support any combination of servers, with the option to build communities within them - as we have. If you're interested, please contact our API Lead Elliott, elliott@newsmastfoundation.org.

To contribute to Newsmast, all you need to do is make an account and start posting in the communities that interest you. If your contributions help educate, inform, or lead discussion one of our Community Moderators may add you to the 'For You' feed. This Feed showcases hand selected accounts who, often, are experts on the topic.

To keep our communities functioning properly, we use volunteer moderators. Their role is to make sure discussion stays on topic and that nothing is slipping through our filters or overwhelming our communities. We’re also setting up editorial boards for each of our communities. This will be a group of people who can help steer and oversee the direction of a community, similar to the boards used by academic journals.

Yes, like all apps Newsmast wants to keep getting better and meeting the needs of more people. We’ve come a long way since we launched and we’re hoping to go even further still! There’s lots of things in the works so if you want to keep up, follow us at @newsmast@newsmast.social to get a sneak peek of what’s on the way.