Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla and the founder and Chief Engineer of SpaceX created a lot of uproar back in April, 2022 when he announced his plans to buy Twitter with which he acquired on October 27, 2022 for $44 billion. After only a few days of joining, he made a number of significant decisions that annoyed many.
Due to his decision to charge for verification badges and lay off thousands of Twitter employees, many people, including celebrities, threatened to boycott the popular microblogging site and switch to other platforms, according to reports. According to reports, Twitter may have lost one million authentic users since Elon Musk took over.
Musk previously referred to himself as a “free speech absolutist,” but the platform began suspending accounts of users after his acquisition of the company after they changed their profile names to Musk’s and added his profile image.
Later, he said that until users explicitly stated “parody” in their accounts, the platform would immediately ban users who impersonated others. However, some users who did that were also banned by Twitter.
Musk announced that well-known individuals, such as politicians, will receive an additional “official” tag on their profiles after allowing people to basically purchase verification marks for their profiles with a $8 subscription to Twitter Blue.
Mastodon has been the most recent and biggest beneficiary of Twitter users’ dissatisfaction in pursuit of an alternative social media platform that is comparable to Twitter. What then is this highly talked about platform and why are people jumping on it now more than ever?
Mastodon, named after an extinct relative of mammoths and elephants is a “free, open-source decentralized social media platform” that was introduced in 2016 by software developer Eugen Rochko, which calls itself “a viable alternative to Twitter.”
Mastodon has gained over 500,000 users since Musk took control over Twitter. The exodus is mostly the result of uncertainty and worry brought on by Musk’s brief reign over Twitter.
Since Mastodon is an open source platform, anyone can access, modify, and redistribute its original source code. By spotting and resolving issues, adding new features, and localizing Mastodon’s interface into various languages, anyone can contribute to the code that powers the social media platform.
Nonetheless, there are problems with the way Mastodon works. It has admitted that embracing free and open source software necessitates a loss of control over who can use it.
People exclusively register for and share material on Twitter because it is a single social network. Mastodon on the other hand is a federated platform meaning a number of social networks or servers that connect to one another are controlled by various individuals or organizations.
In camparing mastodon to Twitter, firstly posts are called “toots”rather than of “tweets”.More so, you would have twice as many characters to write a post ypu would also have more control over who can can see your post.
Author-Abednego Abaidoo
