The Elon goodbye
Twitter has experienced a user exodus after Musk’s takeover... and Mastodon is the destination for many
AT this point it’s pretty safe to say things at Twitter are not going well.
New owner Elon Musk appears to have fired half the staff, and made various somewhat unwise changes to how the social media service works. And then abruptly changed them back.
Some two weeks after paying £44bn for Twitter, Musk told the remaining staff that the company faced a difficult future.
All this has led some to seek a new social home, the most high profile of them is actor and writer Stephen Fry, famously one of Twitter’s early adopters. He deleted his account last week and moved to another social network platform called Mastodon.
It’s obvious on creating an account why Mastodon has become a safe haven for many users abandoning Twitter – it’s the social network that’s most like Twitter in how it works, and it’s free. But there are differences.
The best way to get started is either to download the official Mastodon app or visit the website joinmastodon.org. On creating an account the first and biggest difference between the two services becomes apparent.
While Twitter is a single individual service and company, Mastodon has free software that allows anyone to set up their own microblogging service on their own server.
Users can sign up for an account on any server – which are often linked to particular localities or focused on a particular activity – but are also then able to communicate with users with accounts on other servers.
Mastodon is free to use and free of advertising. Funding comes from users who can donate to keep the server their account is on up and running.
Mastodon’s underlying technology means users can also communicate with users of other services outside Mastodon in a wider community known as the Fediverse. Once you’ve chosen your server and signed up for an account, you’ll get an identifier which looks like this – @name@ server. And from here on in things get a lot more familiar.
Your posts to the service are known as ‘toots’ not tweets, and can be anything up to 500 characters long – images and links can also be added.
Like Twitter you can follow people, and they can follow you. On the Mastodon app you’ll see a timeline of toots from your corner of Mastodon, and one from the wider federated world.
At this point it certainly seems like a viable alternative to Twitter, but it’s obviously important to note that not everybody you followed on Twitter service will be active on Mastodon.
You might quickly start to feel like it’s a much nicer place than Twitter has become – there’s little bickering, and the users on there seem determined to keep it that way.
Some two weeks after paying £44billion for Twitter, Musk told the remaining staff that the company faced a difficult future.