The one to follows her, get her. A few weeks ago we learned that Elon Musk had bought 9.2% of Twitter. Shortly after, the South African tycoon continued to insist, with the intention of gaining full control of the company. All seemed lost, but Elon Musk has finally taken over Twitter for $44 billion. We imagine that the 2.9 billion he paid at the end of March was something like the “down payment”. And many users seem unenthusiastic about the idea, so it didn’t take us long to see the first outraged people who are convinced that they are going to unsubscribe from Twitter.
Mass exodus on Twitter?
It is not the first nor will it be the last time that a tycoon has bought a social network or a messaging service of great importance. We have seen it several times with Zuckerberg. Instagram and WhatsApp purchases were already controversial in their day, but with Elon, things have been different. There are many users who do not share his vision of ‘freedom of expression‘ and consider it a danger that the man with the most money in the world takes over a network of the caliber of Twitter.
Musk’s critics are already campaigning to get him off Twitter. The net chosen to take refuge in is Mastodona platform that gave a lot to talk about a few years ago when many users began to complain about Twitter and censorship.
What is Mastodon?
Mastodon is a social network of code open source which works with decentralized servers. The network is made up ofinstances», which are servers provided by the users themselves. Mastodon users create their own communities, and only members of those communities—and members of other federated instances—can read messages. Regarding the way to interact with the network, Mastodon has a limit of 500 characterstwice as much as Twitter.
Mastodon is said to be a free and uncensored network because there is no central body that moderates the content. Each community sets its standards and regulates its content. In this aspect, Mastodon is very similar to Discord or Reddit. However, the network does have some general rules in which basic rules of conduct are required of the communities, especially to prevent the creation of communities that could threaten the freedom and privacy of people.
Generally speaking, Mastodon is a good alternative to Twitter, but its operation is not identical. Mastodon ‘instances’ function as content filters, and users are grouped around themes. In addition, each user can contribute a server to start a community on a specific topic. The messages published in said community will not be stored on Mastodon’s private servers, but on those of the instance administrators themselves.
Mastodon does not belong to anyone, so it cannot be sold, that is, it cannot change hands. According to the developers of Mastodon, the network cannot break and it also cannot be blocked by governments. The key to this point would be in the decentralization. Of course, this should not be misleading: that Mastodon is designed on a distributed network does not mean that it works on a blockchain.
