Twitter Exodus: Unraveling the Rise of Mastodon as a Nonprofit Alternative

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• 🌎Twitter Exodus: Unraveling the Rise of Mastodon as a Nonprofit Alternative📱

Twitter Exodus: Unraveling the Rise of Mastodon as a Nonprofit Alternative

Further criticism has been given out to Twitter owner Elon Musk following continuous updates that many can’t seem to comprehend, from general users who find Musk favoring Twitter Blue users to brand agencies who view Twitter’s transformation to X as an act that does nothing but plummet brand value.

Though Twitter still remains one of the most popular social media platforms at the moment, it has lost around 32 million users since last October, when Musk officially took over Twitter and started making his changes. The runaways have since tried to find platforms to switch over to, and this is where Mastodon has played its part.

Nonprofit Mastodon

Mastodon is a German-based social media platform becoming one of the places Twitter deserters have run to. Founded in 2016 by software developer Eugen Rochko, Mastodon shares a few similarities to Twitter with a few new twists to offer our modern society.

Unlike Facebook, Reddit, or Twitter itself, Mastodon is a nonprofit, decentralized microblogging platform, describing itself as a “federated network which operates in a similar way to email.” What this means is not only does Mastodon try its hardest to benefit the public rather than its shareholders, but every server is run by individuals, groups, or organizations however they choose rather than by a single corporation.

How does this work?

The Decentralized Way

We’ve been hearing a lot of decentralized this, decentralized that, and it is often correlated with blockchain, but this isn’t the case with Mastodon. What decentralized means here is that every server available in Mastodon is run by communities for the members of said community, with rules and moderation policies that they’ve set up all on their own.

When you first create your Mastodon account, you are directed to a page with a list of servers to choose from. You can choose servers by filtering regions, languages, topics, and more. Choosing a server that will generate your profile’s address allows you to find people to follow and communicate with users inside and outside your chosen server.

Some of these servers are open to anyone joining, while others are either invite-only or set with regulations made by the admin. For example, applicants joining a server specifically made for doctors would need to demonstrate that they are, in fact, doctors, whether by including links to their research or proving that they are professionally certified.

Users have expressed that choosing a server on the spot can be stressful, and Mastodon has assured that users will be able to move from one server to another. Mastodon has also made a server named mastodon.social that new users can join in case choosing a specific server right away becomes confusing.

So, if the majority of Mastodon’s servers were created by communities and organizations, what does Mastodon as a corporation provide? Its source code.

Open Source

By being decentralized and open-source, anyone can download, modify, and install Mastodon on their own server, and the developers of the platform don’t own the copyright.

Though this is the case, every use of Mastodon’s source code should still be acknowledged and not passed off as one’s original software, which was the case with former President Donald Trump’s social media platform, Truth Social. When Rochko found out that Trump had used Mastodon’s code, claiming it was owned by Trump’s team.

Truth Social was given an ultimatum to make the source code publicly available in compliance with the license. If not completed in 30 days, their license would be permanently revoked. This happened on October 26 last year.

Aside from being open source, what are the things shared and unshared between the two microblogging platforms, Twitter and Mastodon?

Twitter vs. Mastodon

Mastodon’s equivalent of tweets are officially called “toots” but have recently been simply referred to as “posts.” Like Twitter, Mastodon allows users to reply, retoot*, favorite, and bookmark posts. Hashtags can also be used when posting on Mastodon. Mastodon has three different timelines, including Home, Local, and Federated. The Home timeline shows posts from people that users follow, the Local timeline shows posts from all users in your server, and the Federated timeline shows you all the public posts from users that people in your server follow.

*Retoot: Mastodon’s equivalent of a retweet.

Unlike Twitter, users on Mastodon can’t perform any quote tooting, which is apparently an intentional choice made by the founder. Rochko believes that simply replying to a toot should be the way Mastodon users communicate with others. By quote tooting, it seems as if you’re speaking with an audience instead of the person you are commenting on, or the person you are actually supposed to talk to.

At the moment, Mastodon is missing a private direct message feature, and any message directed to a specific user can only be sent by mentioning them. Mastodon allows users to make posts only visible to your followers or users you’ve mentioned, similar to Twitter’s Circle feature. You can post up to four images to a post up to eight megabytes in size and a video as well as audio of any length with a file size limit of 40 megabytes.

Mastodon is still a very much smaller platform compared to Twitter, with different content guidelines for each individual community, providing a variety of different user experiences. Even so, Mastodon actually exists inside what’s called a “Fediverse,” an interconnected web of various social media services, granting Mastodon users access to other decentralized social networks.

Whether you’d like to carry on with the open but somewhat interpersonal communicating platform that is Twitter, or the more direct but vast Mastodon, depends on your needs and preferences.

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