A new Mastodon of the universe?
IT’S A BRAVE APP THAT TAKES ON TWITTER – BUT HERE IT COMES
MANY have tried, all have failed – yet that doesn’t seem to stop young upstarts having another go at knocking Twitter off its perch.
This week’s young pretender is an interesting beast called Mastodon, which seems determined to try to replicate the experience of using Twitter, but without the bad bits.
Mastodon isn’t exactly new, of course – it sprang to life a couple of years ago, but has seen its popularity grow as a series of missteps by Twitter itself has left some users seeking alternatives.
Just this week Twitter changed the rules for the developers of third party apps for the social network, such as Twitterrific and Tweetbot. These apps can no longer use the “streaming services” function of Twitter, so they can’t use push notifications or update timelines automatically.
This is just the latest in a series of moves by Twitter to nudge users in the direction of using its own app – which is fair enough, but seems to have advertisers rather than users in mind.
Add to this the issues with abuse, and the spreading of less than accurate information, and you can begin to see why some people are seeking a viable alternative.
So, we come back to Mastodon, and ask ourselves, why is it different?
IT HAS NO OWNER
MASTODON is a social network which looks and feels very much like Twitter – you can do many of the same things – follow and be followed, post images, text, video, reply and favourite “toots”, as they call posts, among other things. But the biggest difference between Twitter and Mastodon is the latter is owned by nobody – it is opensource software that can be used by anyone. There is no centralised company controlling the network.
Anyone can install their own “instance” of Mastodon on a web server and run it themselves, and all the different “instances” can connect to each other. So, while you have to join one, you can still follow people from others.
Each instance can have its own rules, and even be themed around some topic or other, so it’s worth seeking out one that’s right for you. But thanks to the common core software, all instances work together to form a coherent network.
SAFE AND SECURE
MASTODON was built to tackle the abuse issues Twitter has from the ground up, and so includes all manner of ways to keep those with less than honourable intentions at bay. There are different levels of visibility for your posts (they can be totally private or totally public, or anything in between), and the very fact that your account is run on a small server that is moderated by like-minded individuals (remember, you chose which “instance” to join, and they can have their own rules about what is acceptable and what is not) means problems are a lot less likely to arise in the first place.
MORE ROOM TO WRITE
MASTODON allows you to write posts up to 500 characters long, which is almost twice as many as Twitter’s 280. So you can be more expressive. You can post links, pics and videos, too – and there’s a nifty feature that allows you to hide sensitive or spoiler material until your followers click a button to reveal it.
FREE AND AD-FREE
AS there is no company behind Mastodon looking to make a profit, it’s free to use and contains no advertising. In fact, the safety features built-in discourage “brands” from creating accounts and inserting themselves into your world – it’s much harder for them to do that on Mastodon.
It gives you a lot more control over what you see and who you connect with. And the timeline is not monkeyed about with by some unknowable algorithm. Everything appears chronologically.
While Mastodon is web-based, there are also client apps for both iPhone and Android.
Of course, any social network will struggle to make gains over those already established. Twitter and Facebook users have their own communities within those services that are very hard to leave, especially if they are not immediately replicated in the new space – your preferred social network is always where your friends already are.
But Mastodon seems to be gaining some traction – there are servers with almost half-a-million people signed up to them now, and many more smaller ones.
And it might catch on still further if Twitter continues to shoot itself in the foot.
Visit joinmastodon.org to find out more.