If Twitter is indeed failing then what will come next? Where will people turn to instead for news and information? For sharing opinions? For political discourse and meme spreading? The answer may be a new decentralized social media platform known as Mastodon that is actually a collection of several servers rather than a single platform. Making it harder to understand but also harder to control.
The BBC explains:
“Mastodon is not one platform. It’s not one ‘thing’ and it is not owned by one person or firm. All of these different servers link together, and form a collective network, but they are owned by different people and organizations.
This is called decentralized, and fans of decentralized platforms like them for exactly this reason – they can’t be run at the whim of a single entity, bought or sold.’
However the downside of this is that you are instead at the whim of the person or organization running your server – if they decide to abandon it, you lose your account. Mastodon is asking server owners to give their users three months-notice if they decide to close it.
The original founder of Twitter, Jack Dorsey, is working on a new network called BlueSky, by the way – and he has said he wants that to be decentralized too.”
From my point of view if servers can just disappear that is a huge turn off as you would never want to lose your followers or the record of everything you’ve posted, liked/saved, or commented on. In other words you’d never want to lose your digital identity. But for those who have already migrated away from Twitter that’s exactly what has already happened. Same for people who have left MySpace or Facebook or any other social media platform. Perhaps what we need then is a way to save all of our social media records in one place. Or perhaps some people want to start over with a clean slate. Want to be forgotten. And perhaps Mastodon is how they’ll do that.
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The New York Times adds further color:
“Twitter is a single social network, which means that people sign up for and share content only on Twitter. Mastodon is what is known as a federated platform, meaning it is a collection of social networks — or servers — that link together but are owned by different people or groups.
Mastodon is a part of the Fediverse, or federated universe, a group of federated platforms that share communication protocols.
Unlike Twitter, Mastodon presents posts in chronological order, rather than based on an algorithm. It also has no ads; Mastodon is largely crowdfunded. Most servers are funded by the people who use them. The servers that Mastodon oversees — Mastodon Social and Mastodon Online — are funded through Patreon, a membership and subscription service platform often used by content creators.
Although Mastodon visually resembles Twitter, its user experience is more akin to that of Discord, a talking and texting app where people also join servers that have their own cultures and rules.
Unlike Twitter and Discord, Mastodon does not have the ability to make its users, or the people who create servers, do anything. That includes establishing content moderation, or rules for what posts to keep up and what to take down.
But servers can dictate how they interact with one another — or whether they interact at all in a shared stream of posts.”
All in all, the idea of a decentralized server based approach to social media is interesting as you could start or find your own community of like-minded individuals. But at the same time wouldn’t that just divide us even more? Creating even more closed silos where you only see opinions that you agree with and never learn anything new?! When it comes to social media a single Town Square with content moderation and no misinformation is still the best approach. If we can ever get there. But until then Mastodon might be worth trying out. Especially with the direction Twitter is heading in.
So, what do you think? Will you be leaving Twitter and joining Mastodon?! Or will you be staying put?
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Is Mastodon the future of social media?
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