Since Tesla CEO and billionaire Elon Musk took over, Twitter has been a bit of a mess. He has cut the company’s workforce in half, changed the platform’s verification system, gotten into arguments with users over jokes, and admitted that dumb things might occur as he restructures one of the most prominent information ecosystems in the world.
The takeover has been on the lips of people and on the interweb for quite some time now. He issued a warning to the company’s remaining employees amid the departure of senior executives in charge of data privacy, cybersecurity, and regulatory compliance, saying that Twitter may not survive if it cannot figure out a way to generate at least half of its revenue from subscriptions.
A lot more restructuring is expected in the future, some of which are not going to be received well by many Twitter users. Some users have even started looking for an alternative to the platform, with some opting to stay. Mastodon and even Tumblr are emerging as new (or renewed) alternatives, though it is unclear if the controversy is driving many users away.
In fact, for some, enjoying the chaos from the front row may be amusing, and would want it to continue. Mastodon acquired 230,000 more users in the week after Musk’s Twitter takeover, bringing its total number of active users to 655,000. However, the increase in traffic is causing the platform to experience growing pains and making some new users confused. However, it has also brought to light an alternative social media model.
What is Mastodon?
Mastodon calls itself a decentralized social media platform. Mastodon is made up of thousands of independently run servers, also known as instances, each of which has its own rules and moderation policies, as opposed to a single organization providing and managing the platform.
Mastodon is like a vast fleet of spaceships floating around in space with some method to connect with each other. There is a person who has control over Mastodon’s software platform. But that person has no control over what occurs in any Mastodon instance. The users of that instance and the server administrator should decide that.
What is the key difference between Twitter and Mastodon?
Mastodon is fundamentally comparable to Twitter for users in that both are microblogging systems featuring a feed of posts, user following, and hashtags. Unlike tweets, which Twitter limits to 280 characters, posts on Mastodon can be 500 characters long and are referred to as toots.
However, the primary distinction for users of the more recent platform is that no algorithm determines what they see or when they view it. Users’ likes of posts are hidden from other users, preventing the pile-on that can happen with viral posts on Twitter. Additionally, users on Mastodon are unable to quote other users’ posts.
Instead of registering through a centralized interface as Twitter users do, newcomers must join a server. Users can join a variety of servers, from global sites like mastodon.social, which has roughly 145,000 users right now, to local servers like aus.social. There are additional interest groups, such as those for gamers and fans of heavy metal music.
What advantages does Mastodon offer?
Mastodon users express their excitement about the platform’s ability to engage with groups without the polarization that has come to characterize Twitter. This is one of the main reasons that people who are migrating to Mastodon are giving for leaving Twitter.
This demonstrates how social media platform design can affect user behavior. Twitter kind of nudges you towards a specific type of kind performative outrage. Mastodon seeks to nudge users away from doing that. The major way it accomplishes this is by encouraging users to utilize content warnings liberally.
