Express News Service
Amid the ‘doom and gloom’ headlines about Twitter, many users are exploring Mastodon, with over one million people joining the platform in the last month. While this is only a fraction of Twitter’s 450 million user base, the uptick is quite significant.
Mastodon is an open-source, decentralised platform that allows anyone to run a server, either in isolation or connected to Fediverse (or a federated universe), which is a network of such servers. It’s a little complex and, therefore, signing up on Mastodon is not quite straightforward. Read on.
Getting Started The first step is to find a server (among 4,000 public Mastodon servers) to sign up for. You can look up a popular server on join mastodon.org or check out third-party websites like instances. Social that offers a directory of Mastodon servers. It’s like how email works. Users pick up a service and then create their account on it. Protocols, however, allow a Gmail user to mail someone with an Outlook ID seamlessly.
Therefore, on Mastodon, my handle, @[email protected], represents my full identity, unlike Twitter, where @baxiabhishek is sufficient to reach me.
Once you’ve decided on the server such as mastodon.social, toot.community, mstdn.social, mas.to, you have to apply for an account. The sudden surge in users has resulted in long delays for the confirmation mail to arrive, especially on popular servers. Once that is done, sign up, create your profile, and follow your friends. That’s that. The biggest resistance to migration is the loss of the network that one has curated over the years.
There’s no perfect solution, but a third-party service, Debirdify, tackles this conundrum by helping users find accounts that have their Mastodon IDs added to their Twitter handle or bio.
Familiar territory
Mastodon looks familiar to Twitter with a scrolling timeline of ‘posts’. Unlike Twitter though, there’s no algorithm that determines what you see in your feed. There are some rough edges as well. The user experience on Mastodon is slightly klutzy and lacks the polish of a mature platform.
Each post typically has a 500-character limit; you can also post an image, a video, an audio file or create a poll. To engage with a post, you can ‘like or ‘boost’ it; the latter is like retweeting. But there’s no equivalent to quote-tweeting—you can’t share a post with your commentary.
Beyond the basics, however, Mastodon ups the ante. Getting verified is seamless if you own
a website. You can also edit your posts without the need for a paid subscription. A unique ‘Content Warning’ feature helps you hide your post requiring your followers to click to reveal the entire post—handy for sharing triggering content or avoiding spoilers.
As Mastodon grows, diverse challenges around content moderation, privacy and alignment with law and enforcement might appear, and navigating this labyrinth will be an exercise in social media consciousness.
But for now, it’s a choice between a distributed and diverse platform and one run by a monolithic, resourceful corporation. Your call.
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