What is Mastodon?

Mastodon is an open-source and decentralized microblogging network. Mastodon is part of the fediverse.

Twitter users may have heard of Mastodon and wish to explore it; this guide is simply a "getting started" for doing just that.

Mastoson is probably the most familiar/related to Twitter decentralized social media available. Users may remember Mastodon springing onto the “mainstream” scene for a brief moment in 2017 and again in 2018, during rising user concerns about privacy. At the time, Mastodon was new(er), lacked a user base, lacked many features found in the platform today, and buggy.

The new Mastodon is refined and features many more feature than it did in 2017 and 2018. The biggest plus about Mastodon is it’s decentralization - different servers federate (communicate) with each other. This makes Mastodon resilient to the likes of service outages and censorship.

The Fediverse

The word “Fediverse” is a combination of two words: “federation” and “universe. It is commonly referenced name for decentralized social media, including Mastodon. While Mastodon is arguably the most popular platform on the fediverse - especially for users looking for alternatives Twitter since the announcement of Elon Musk interest in buying (and then, in fact, purchasing) Twitter — it is not the only platform in the fediverse.

Different fediverse platforms can actually “talk” to each other through the decentralized social networking protocol, ActivityPub. ActivityPub is based on the ActivityStreams 2.0 data format and is an official W3C recommended standard as published by the E3C Social Web Working Group.

Fediverse.party is an excellent guide for learning more about the fediverse and the different platforms.

What does this mean for regular users? Simply put, users on the different fediverse platforms - which in turn have their own decentralized servers or “instances” — can interact with each other, including following and viewing posts without signing up for an account on another platform:

• A Mastodon user can interact with users on a Pleroma (a lightweight microblogging platform, similar to Mastodon) server.
• A Mastodon user can see and follow posts from a PixelFed account (the fediverse’s answer to Instagram.)
• A Mastodon user can follow users across varies instances of Misskey.

Mastodon VS Twitter

Decentralized

Decentralization in Mastodon has nothing to do with blockchain technology.

Mastodon’s decentralized nature makes it resistant to censorship by governments or internet service providers (ISPs), In comparison to Twitter, which is centralized, it can more easily be blocked or censored by governments or ISPs.

Most users may be inclined to think this means Mastodon servers are “isolated” or cannot talk to another instance, however this is not the case.

Mastodon servers can and often do federate with other servers; a single-user instance can federate with 50k user instances, 10 user instances, 8k user instances, and so on. This enables the users of different instances to interact seamlessly with each other. Users are also free to migrate between instances, which is useful if a user’s instance is shutting down or the server is no longer serving the needs of the user.

Mastodon users can also interact with other decentralized social media of the fediverse. For example, assuming the server administration enables this, Mastodon users can interact with Pleroma and PixelFed users.

What if someone spins up a spammy or malicious Mastodon instance? Thankfully, Mastodon instance administrators do not have to “federate” with all instances - so, upon discovery of a spammy or malicious Mastodon server, server administrators can opt out of federating or connecting their users with that instance.

In some specific cases, this may be troublesome for users who wish to communicate with other users on an instance that does not federate with their own. However, with built-in migration tools, users can migrate to a server or instance that better suits their needs.

Open-source

Unlike Twitter, Mastodon’s source code is fully open-source. This promotes transparency and leverages the global development and security communities. With Mastodon’s source code, users can spin up their own servers or instances if desired.

An open-source codebase also allows anyone to audit or fork the code. This audit-for-all system allows anyone to report issues or vulnerabilities to the project maintainer. Forking can contribute to the longevity or continuance of a project, even after the primary maintainer abandons it.

Ads vs No Ads

Mastodon is ad-free, whereas Twitter shows ads and targeted ads. Twitter's targeted ads system relies on collecting/harvesting user information - such as demographics, engagement, and location data - in order to show potentially "relevant" ads.

Twitter's ad revenue is the primary revenue stream from the platform; in 2021, it was estimated ad revenue made up approximately 92% of Twitter's revenue.

Mastodon server/instance revenue vary. Mastodon's development is supported by contributors and company sponsors. For specific instances, typically the servers are supported by the admins (out of pocket) or the users themselves.

Little Personally Identifiable Information (PII) required for registration

Specifics ultimately depend on the server administration - for example, some servers might log IP or other potentially identifying device information. However, unlike Twitter (and other popular social media such as Instagram), users are not required/asked to divulge PII like phone numbers.

Users should be aware that just like Twitter, server admins can see everything posted on Mastodon, including DMs.

Algorithm presence

Algorithms rely on machine learning to function. Massive amounts of data is required to adequately "train" algorithmic platforms - on social media platforms like Twitter, the data comes from the users, hence the "need" for data collection.

Mastodon does not have an algorithm. It's on the users to curate their own feeds and posts. However, Mastodon can show "popular" topics as discussed on the instance and/or federated network should the user choose (via the Explore page).

Ultimately, Twitter's platform is closed-source despite its supposed moves towards a more transparent, and potentially open-source model, so verifying what data it exactly uses to drive the platform's algorithm is educated guesswork at best.

Signing up to Mastodon

Most users will find the signup process easy - until the part where they must pick a server. Picking a server is where Mastodon’s difference from Twitter begins to show for the user; specifically, this is part of Mastodon’s decentralized nature.

Picking a server is not the end all, be all. Users are free...