Mastodon is an open-source social media platform that operates as a decentralized network, allowing users to choose their own instance while still being able to see content from other users across the platform. It has gained significant popularity with over a million new users in November 2022 alone. To interact with Mastodon's API, Laravel can be used with Vonage's Messages API to receive incoming SMS messages and send them as "toots" on Mastodon using Expose to expose the local server to the internet and obtain a public HTTPS URL for configuration purposes.