What Is Mastodon, and Why Are So Many Users Leaving Twitter to Join It?

26-08-2023

12:23 PM

1 min read

Amid concerns over the direction that Twitter seems to be taking after its takeover by billionaire Elon Musk, a number of users are flocking to a platform called Mastodon.
Since October 27, when the SpaceX and Tesla CEO formalised his Twitter takeover, Mastodon has gained nearly 500,000 new users, effectively doubling its user base.

Mastodon

Founded in 2016 by German software developer Eugen Rochko, Mastodon is a decentralised, open source ad-free social media platform.
- Mastodon, which is not just one website, is decentralized — meaning the service is not controlled by a single entity.
It is essentially made up of thousands of different servers, or “instances”, run across the world.
All the different instances on Mastodon can communicate to each other — that is, what users in a certain instance are posting is accessible to users in a different instance.
- It can be understood by following analogy:
  - When a user first creates an account on Mastodon, they will have to choose a server or instance they want to join.
  - This is similar to how, when they create an email account, they choose between Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo etc. that generates their profile address.
  - No matter where a user initially creates their email account, they can still send mails to users on other email platforms.
  - Now, imagine that happening over a single platform, with the different email services being different servers, or instances.

Users or organisations can even start their own servers. Otherwise, there’s a list of servers which focus on specific locations or topics of interest.
- Eg., if a user chooses to join Mastodon via a clime justice server, their username would be [name]@climatejustice.social.
- Similarly, if someone joins Mastodon social, their username would be [name]@mastodon.social.
- Both these users can still communicate with each other and see posts on their servers.
The admin of each server can decide the content moderation guidelines for that particular server.

It essentially means that anyone can download, modify and install Mastodon on their own server. The developers of the platform don’t own the copyright.
However, if someone creates a platform using Mastodon’s code, they will have to acknowledge the source of the code.
Former President of the United States Donald Trump’s social media platform, Truth Social, initially launched with Mastodon code and passed it off as if it were original software, until Mastodon called it out.

Since Mastodon is a collection of thousands of different servers, there is not a singular content moderation strategy for the entire platform.
Content moderation is done by admins of each server who can set their own rules.
Users can also migrate to other instances on Mastodon. Here’s an example to illustrate that:
- Assume a user joined a Mastodon instance on, say, climate change.
- Now, down the line, if a certain user, or group of users start posting content that is hateful, illegal or extremist, other users on the instance can migrate to a different instance and cut ties with the previous one.
Migrating users can choose to block the previous instance, in which case the new one they join will not be able to communicate with it.

The exodus is largely the result of confusion after the takeover of Twitter by Musk.
- Musk initially said that he was a free speech absolutist.
- However, post his takeover, the platform started suspending accounts of users who had changed their profile names to Musk’s along with his profile picture.
- After allowing users to essentially buy verification marks for their profile with an $8 subscription of Twitter Blue, Musk said that prominent personalities like politicians will be given an additional tag of “official” on their profiles.
- However, within hours of launching the “official” tag, he scrapped it saying that it was another way of creating a two-class system.