
Mastodon Social – Twitter users who visit the social media platform Mastodon think it’s a different animal. Davide Bonaldo/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images
After Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter by storm, people are looking for alternatives to the increasingly toxic microblogging social media platform. Many of those abandoning or hedging their bets have turned to Mastodon, which has attracted hundreds of thousands of new users since acquiring Twitter.
But while Mastodon supports many of the same social networking features as Twitter, it’s not a single platform. Rather, it is a federation of independent, interconnected servers. Mastodon’s servers are based on open source software developed by the German non-profit Mastodon gGmbH. Interconnected Mastodon servers, together with other servers that can “talk” to Mastodon servers, are collectively known as the “fediverse”.
The main aspect of fediverse is that each server is governed by the rules set by the people who run it. If you think of fediver as a university, each Mastodon server is like a dorm.
The dorm you’re initially assigned to may be somewhat random, but it still strongly shapes the conversations you hear and the relationships you form. You can still interact with people living in other dorms, but your dorm guides and rules dictate what you can do.
If you’re particularly unhappy with your dorm, you can move to a new housing situation—another dorm, fraternity, apartment—that’s a better fit and will bring your relationship with you. But then you are subject to the new rules of where you live. There are hundreds of Mastodon servers, called instances, where you can set up your account, and these instances have different rules and regulations about who can join and what content is allowed.
Instead, social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook bring everyone together into one giant dorm. As millions or billions of people joined, the companies running these platforms added more floors and bedrooms. Everyone could communicate with each other and theoretically participate in each other’s conversations inside the dorm, but everyone also has to live by the same rules.
If you didn’t like them or didn’t follow the rules, you had to leave the megatank, but you couldn’t bring your relationships with you to your new housing—a different social media platform—or talk to the people who remained in your original megatank. . These platforms took advantage of the resulting fear of missing out on the opportunity to lock people in a high-security dormitory where their otherwise private behavior was used for advertising.
Mastodon supports all known social media functions: post, like, repost and follow. Eugen Rochko via Wikimedia Commons
Large social media companies sell advertising to pay for two main services: the technical hardware and software infrastructure that allows users to access the platform, and the social infrastructure for usage, policy and content management that ensures the platform meets user expectations and rules.
In Mastodon’s server collection, if you don’t like what someone is doing, you can disconnect and move to another server, but keep the connections you already have. This eliminates the fear of losing, as users may otherwise be locked out of the server due to other people’s bad behavior.
There are several factors that should put Mastodon servers under a lot of pressure to proactively and responsibly moderate the behavior of their members. First, most servers don’t want other servers to completely disconnect, so the behavior of the members polices a lot of reputational pressure, and they don’t tolerate trolls and harassers.
Second, people can move between servers quite easily, so server admins can compete to provide the best moderation experience that attracts and keeps people.
Third, the technical and financial costs of creating a new server are much higher than the costs of maintaining the server. This should limit the number of new servers created to avoid bans, which will avoid the never-ending challenge of new spam and troll accounts that major social media platforms face.
Mastodon’s pooled server model also has potential drawbacks. First, finding a server to join Mastodon can be difficult, especially when the number of people trying to find servers leads to waiting lists, and the rules and values of the people running the server are not always easy to find.
Second, there are significant financial and technical challenges in maintaining the servers, which grow as the number of members and their activities increase. After the honeymoon, Mastodon users should be prepared to pay membership fees, NPR-style fundraising campaigns, or podcast-style advertisements to cover server hosting costs that can run into the hundreds of dollars per month per server.
Third, despite calls for newspapers, universities, and government to host their own servers, there are complex legal and professional issues that can severely limit the ability of public institutions to effectively mitigate their “dorms.” Professional companies with their own vetting methods and established codes of conduct and ethics may be better equipped to host and maintain Mastodon servers than other types of institutions.
Fourth, the current “nuclear option” of servers, which completely sever ties with other servers, leaves little room for repairing and reconnecting relationships. Once the connection between two servers is lost, it would be difficult to restore it. This situation can destabilize user migration and strengthen polarization echo chambers.
Finally, there is tension between long-time Mastodon users and newcomers over content warnings, hashtags, post visibility, accessibility, and a tone that differs from what was trending on Twitter.
But with Twitter in meltdown and long-term problems with major social media platforms, for many people the new land of Mastodon and the Federation need not be all milk and honey.
Write an article and join a growing community of over 185,900 academics and researchers from 4,984 institutions. It features microblogging features similar to Twitter, provided by multiple, seamless nodes called instances or servers, each with its own code of conduct, terms of service, privacy policy, privacy options, and policy oversight.
Each user is a member of a specific Mastodon server that can communicate seamlessly with users on any other server. This is to give users the flexibility to choose the server whose strategy they prefer, but maintain access to the larger unified social network. Mastodon is powered by the ActivityPub protocol, making it part of the Fediverse suite of services, including Lemmy, Pixelfed, Fridica, PeerTube, and Threads.
Mastodon’s servers run social networking software capable of communicating using the W3C ActivityPub standard, which has been implemented since version 1.6.
Therefore, a Mastodon user can communicate with users on any other Fediverse server that supports ActivityPub.
In advanced mode, Mastodon approximates TweetDeck’s microblogging user experience. Users post short-form status messages, historically known as toots,
For others to see. As is typical for Mastodon, these messages can contain up to 500 characters of text, exceeding Twitter’s 280 character limit. Some cases also support longer messages.
Users connect to a specific Mastodon server, not to an individual website or application. The servers are connected as nodes in a network, and each server can control its own rules, account permissions, and whether or not to share messages to and from other servers. Many servers have a theme based on a particular interest.
Mastodon includes several specific privacy features. Each message has different privacy options and users can choose whether the message is public or private. Public messages appear in a global stream called a timeline, while private messages are shared only with the user’s followers’ timelines. Messages can also be marked as unlisted by schedules or directly between users. Users can also mark their accounts as completely private. Messages in the timeline can be displayed with an optional alert contt feature that requires readers to click on the hidden content of the message to reveal it. Mastodon’s servers used this feature to hide spoilers, enable warnings, and be safe for work (NSFW), although some accounts use this feature to hide links and thoughts that others may not want to read.
Mastodon aggregates real-time reporting in local and federal time zones. The local timeline shows messages from users on a single server, while the unified timeline shows messages across all participating Mastodon servers. Users can communicate between connected Mastodon servers using usernames that have a similar format to all emails. postal addresses.
Mastodon uses community moderation where each server can limit or filter unwanted accounts. types, and Twitter uses one global contt moderation policy. For example, Mastodon’s example mastodon.social and many other cases prohibit illegal use in Germany or France, including Nazi symbolism, invocation of the Holocaust, and incitement to violence against Jews. However, other cases of Mastodon may choose a more open approach to such material. Servers can also choose to limit or filter messages with obsolete contt. Eug Rochko, lead author of Mastodon software, believes that small, tight-knit communities are more effective at dealing with unwanted behavior than
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