New Social Network Mastodon - Features, Review

Mastodon a microblogging platform is free and open-source software that is used over the world for running self-hosted social network services. Its microblogging services consist of a large number of independently run nodes, known as instances. These instances come with their code of conduct, terms of service, privacy policy, privacy options, and moderation policies.

Mastodon was created by a Russian-born German Software developer and was announced on Hacker News in October 2016. Mastodon had an Initial release date of 16 March 2016, which was 6 years ago.

Its preview release was on November 14, 2022, and its stable release was on November 15, 2022. Mastodon was written in Ruby on Rails and JavaScript. Its front end was written in React.js with Redux as a state management system. It is available in 93 languages and is supported on multiple platforms. iOS, Android, Linux, Microsoft Windows, and many more platforms support Mastodon.

Review

Due to Mastodon’s non-algorithm-based contents, the platform is less addictive and if used properly could be much more beneficial than Twitter. Additionally, it uses decentralized networks to remove the central authority that Twitter has. Furthermore, the Twitter communities are full of hate and political disagreements that Mastodon eliminates by using their fediverse structure. The character limit of 500 makes Mastodon more expressive and users can talk about social and political issues more clearly.

Features

Some of the features of the Mastodon are as follows:

Mastodon is highly customizable and how the timeline appears is up to the individual.
It has great privacy options, far better than its competitors.
Mastodon is capable of communicating using W3C’s ActivityPub standard, which helps Mastodon users to interact with users on any other server in the Fediverse that support ActivityPub.
Users on Mastodon can post status messages of up to 500 text-based characters.
There are numerous other Mastodon servers that allow a larger character limit.
Rather than joining a single website or application, Mastodon provides specific servers that are connected as nodes in a network.
Different servers have their own rules, account privileges, and post-sharing policy.
Severs are based on a specific interest. Such as servers based around a particular locality, region, or country.
The messages on the Mastodon timeline come with an optional “content warning” feature, that helps to hide spoilers, trigger warnings, and not safe of work (NSFW) content.
Using community-based moderation, Mastodon’s server can limit or filter out undesirable types of content.
Mastodon uses non-algorithm-based content approach. The content on Mastodon is entirely based on chronological order.

Comparison

Mastodon has multiple competitors in the present world. The most famous competitors are Twitter, Discord, Reddit, Facebook, Instagram, and much more. Here we will compare Mastodon with its biggest competitor Twitter.

Many people are switching to Mastodon from Twitter because of Twitter’s volatility. Twitter uses central authority and controls the overall network, whereas Mastodon uses decentralized servers that define their own rules according to the community.

Mastodon uses the boosts feature rather than retweets. To join Twitter, users are required to sign up for Twitter. But in Mastodon, users are required to sign up to a specific Mastodon server.

Twitter generates revenue via advertising, whereas Mastodon is an open-source project that receives support from Patreon. Due to this reason, Twitter uses algorithms that provide interesting content to a particular user, whereas Mastodon is not motivated by profit from users and provides content in chronological order.

In 2022, when the Twitter community started to fall apart, Mastodon managed to strengthen its communities. Due to Mastodon’s fediverse structure, it is a little harder to understand the platform at the beginning. Furthermore, Mastodon’s posts are limited to 500 characters, which is significantly more than that Twitter’s 280-character limit.