Reach Mastodon and the open web
Learn what Open Web Distribution is—and is not—how the fediverse discovers your selected public work, why the business stays on your site, what public means, updates and removals, UTMs, and a practical strategy without likes, boosts, or a social inbox.
ArtInStack helps your work travel without asking you to move your business onto another social platform.
Open Web Distribution is optional push of selected public posts and photos into the fediverse—independent servers (Mastodon, Pixelfed, and others) that speak ActivityPub. People follow your studio on their home server. Your site remains the home for booking, prints, stories, and brand.
What the fediverse / open web means here
- Many servers, one shared protocol—not one corporate feed.
- Your identity is
@handle@your-custom-domainon your domain, not@[email protected]. - Followers use apps they already have; you keep publishing from ArtInStack.
What Open Web Distribution does
- You enable it for the workspace (plan + connected custom domain + handle).
- You choose individual public posts or photos to share.
- Compatible servers receive a public post with text, a web-safe image when relevant, and a link back to your site.
- Edits and removals send updates or deletion signals when delivery succeeds.
What happens when you publish a photo or post
| Step | Result |
|---|---|
| Item is public and eligible | Share control available |
| You turn Share on | Create delivered to followers / shared inboxes |
| Someone views it on Mastodon (etc.) | They see caption/description and can open your link |
| You edit caption/description | Update delivered when possible |
| You turn Share off | Deletion (tombstone) signaled—caches not guaranteed |
Why the content remains on your website
The federated post is a distribution copy with a home link. Commerce, full series, EXIF, booking, and your design system stay on the photographer site. Open-web links include standard UTM tags (utm_source=fediverse, utm_medium=social, campaign for photo vs post) so your analytics can attribute visits when you use a compatible tag manager or reports. ArtInStack does not run a platform-wide fediverse analytics product on top of that.
How remote users discover it
- Someone follows
@handle@your-domainfrom Mastodon (or compatible apps). - Their server receives the activities you share.
- Boosts or mentions on those networks are their social graph—not an ArtInStack inbox.
What “public” means
Remote servers may fetch, index, cache, and recompress public derivatives and text. Tombstones ask them to drop content; third-party removal cannot be guaranteed. Only share work you accept seeing outside your site. Terms and the in-product enable disclosure state the same risk.
Updates and removals
- Updates apply when remotes accept them (Mastodon needs a proper update timestamp—handled by the platform).
- Share off / delete → deletion signal.
- Share on again after a full tombstone → new public object, not a silent revive of the old identity.
ArtInStack is not a social network
| ArtInStack provides | ArtInStack does not provide |
|---|---|
| Outbound distribute of your selected public work | A social feed of likes, boosts, and replies inside the dashboard |
| Followable studio identity on your domain | Running Mastodon for you as a hosted community product |
| Links home with UTM-ready URLs | Guaranteed purge of every remote cache |
| Thin protocol follow/accept as required for delivery | Social Activity inbox, engagement CRM, or “go viral” tooling |
Inbound engagement stays on the remote apps on purpose. Your business operating system remains the site and dashboard you already use.
Practical distribution strategy
- Enable once; share a few flagship pieces; follow yourself from a personal account to verify.
- Prefer series and stories over dumping the library.
- Write captions for strangers who have never heard of you.
- Measure return visits in your analytics via UTMs—not vanity counts inside ArtInStack.
- Stop whenever it stops serving the studio.
Next: Turn on Open Web Distribution, then Choose what to share to the open web.