Grow your following by joining the Mastodon community, a unique platform that is ad-free, algorithm-free and decentralized. With Buffer, you can connect to any server on Mastodon and publish content. Let’s get started!
This article contains the following sections:
- Connecting and refreshing your Mastodon channel
- Scheduling Mastodon posts
- Image, video, and GIF specifications for Mastodon
- Engaging with Mastodon posts
- Mastodon analytics
- Mastodon error library
These features are available for Mastodon
| Publishing | Analytics | Engagement |
| ✓ |
Connecting and refreshing your Mastodon
You can connect multiple Mastodon accounts to Buffer. Connecting Mastodon works slightly differently from other channels. Because Mastodon is decentralized, you’ll need to select your server first and then you’ll be asked to sign into your account to connect it to Buffer. All the other steps will be the same.
To see a step-by-step guide and troubleshooting steps, checkout the article: Connect your channels to Buffer. If your connected Mastodon requires a refresh, check out the article Refreshing a channel in Buffer.
Scheduling Mastodon posts
| Features & good-to-knows | Notes |
| Scheduling posts | Checkout our step-by-step guide to scheduling posts on any social channel or peruse Mastodon-specific details below. |
| Tagging / mentions |
You can mention users by typing out their full address, e.g. @bufferapp@mastodon.social. For more information, visit our full guide to adding tags (mentions) here. We are unable to autocomplete or verify usernames at this time. |
| Hashtags | You can use a #hashtag to make your post discoverable by anyone searching for that hashtag. Hashtags can contain alphanumeric characters and underscores, but cannot contain numbers only. Learn more about how hashtags work in Buffer here. |
| Character limit | 500 characters per post.
📝Although some Mastodon servers have been customized to support a higher number of characters, Buffer can't detect if the server you're posting to has a higher limit than the default, so we use the default.
|
| Emoji | Although Mastodon supports custom emojis, we only support emoji from our emoji picker at this time. |
| Links |
If you include links in your post, they must begin with http:// or https://, otherwise they'll be shown as plain text. All links are counted as 23 characters, no matter how long they actually are, so there is no need to use a link shortener to save characters. In fact, using a link shortener is actively discouraged. |
Image, video, and GIF specifications for Mastodon
Mastodon supports images, videos, and GIFs.
| Videos | Images | GIFs | |
| Number allowed per post |
1 |
4 | 1 |
| File size |
Up to 40MB. Video will be transcoded to H.264 MP4 with a maximumG bitrate of 1300kbps and frame rate of 60fps |
Up to 8MB. Images will be downscaled to 1.6 megapixels (enough for a 1280x1280 image) |
GIFs are converted to videos. Animated GIFs are converted to soundless MP4s like on Imgur/Gfycat (GIFV). You can also upload soundless MP4 and WebM, which will be handled the same way |
| File types supported | MP4, M4V, MOV, WebM | PNG, JPG, WebP, HEIC | GIF |
| Custom thumbnail supported | No | - | - |
| Autoplay in the feed | No | - | No |
| Giphy and Canva integration | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Alt text | - | Yes. Learn more about adding alt text to your images here. | - |
Engaging with Mastodon posts
Buffer’s engagement features are only available for Facebook and Instagram.
Mastodon analytics
At the moment, we don’t offer Mastodon analytics but basic analytics are coming soon to the Sent Post tab in the publishing area of Buffer. Keep an eye out for updates on our public roadmap.
Mastodon error library
We don't currently have an error library for Mastodon, but feel free to reach out to our Customer Advocates if you're hitting any errors.
📝Do you have a Mastodon feature suggestion? We’d love for you to submit or upvote it here on our feature suggestions board.