por Let’s be honest: it’s not today that Twitter is no longer what it was. The arrival of Elon Musk has made the pre-existing drama more fun, but the problem was already there.
Like almost all social networks, it has helped give voice to many, but it also exalts the worst of human behavior when we are in a group and relatively protected by a certain cloak of anonymity. Additionally, like all social networks, it is aimed at maximizing interactions (at any price) and bringing users to the scroll of death to boost ad revenue.
You see more and more Twitter users announcing their departure to Mastodon, in search of a healthier environment.
What is Mastodon?
Mastodon is no other startup, it’s a community. It is the concerted effort of users, fed up with the standard model of social networks, who seek to maintain the good that these networks have contributed and, at the same time, eliminate what is destroying them little by little.
Mastodon is a software which allows you to interact with other users in a way similar to Twitter. However, there are some fundamental differences:
No one owns Mastodon and no one can buy it. There are no ads. There is no algorithm that optimizes what you see or attempts to maximize revenue from your personal data or online behavior. It is decentralized.
What is Fediverse?
Fediverse is a set of applications (like Mastodon) that share the aforementioned principles, as well as a protocol called ActivityPub. There are many more applications besides Mastodon. All of them can exchange data from a single account (for example, your Mastodon account).
Imagine that Instagram, Facebook, Reddit and YouTube were integrated and from a Twitter post you could respond to one on YouTube, or share a YouTube video on Instagram with just the touch of a button.
Let’s look at some of the current applications of Fediverse:
Pixelfed is an image-sharing network, similar to what Instagram was before it tried to become TikTok. PeerTube is a video sharing network and OwnCast, a video sharing service. streaming.
Friendica is a Facebook free of Zuckerberg or Cambridge Analytics.
How to get started in Mastodon and Fediverse?
The first thing is to choose a server, and here you have one, : surus.
Sign up and create a user, just as you would do on Twitter or any other similar service. However, you will soon see that there are some differences: there is no algorithm that will inject you with posts from strangers in the hope that you will see an advertisement. You have to start following people or you won’t see anything.
Your complete address on Mastodon
You will have an address that is a bit reminiscent of Twitter users. It is made up of two parts: your username and the server you are on (and which you can change). For example, mine and ‘s are:
@[email protected]
@[email protected]
Another difference is that there is no text search. This is a design decision to prevent abuse from trolls. You can only search by hashtags.
A good idea is to start following those users that you already follow on Twitter and who are on Mastodon. To do this, you just have to search for the word «mastodon» on Twitter and specify that you want it to show you only the content of the people you follow:
You can now start writing tweets (called toots here) and exploring Fediverse.
Customers for Mastodon
Although you can use the web app, you’ll probably want a mobile client. You have the official clients, both in the App Store and on Google Play. There are also several clients desktop for Mac, Windows and Linux.
What is surus?
It was Hannibal’s elephant, with which he crossed the Alps. 🙂