While the controversy continues with the landing of Elon Musk as the new owner of Twitter and doubts arise about the continuity and future of this social network, there are users who have valued the possibility of entering alternative social networks.
Mastodon’s decentralized structure is a hybrid model between a social network and email
One of them, Mastodon, is enjoying significant success, with millions of new users signing up in recent weeks. Is about a social network characterized by being open sourceand especially because it is decentralized, which means that instead of a single server to which all its users connect, there are different servers where separate and independent conversations are generated, although with the advantage that users can participate in all they.
In this sense, Mastodon’s decentralized structure would be more like mail or emailin which each user can receive their service from a different provider but this does not prevent them from being able to exchange emails with users of email accounts provided by other different platforms.
Thanks to this decentralization, what some perceive as a risk is avoided: that, as has happened with Twitter, there may be someone who buys the platform and does and undoes as they please. Something like this would be very difficult to achieve with Mastodon precisely because each server (called “instance”) has that character of decentralization and independence.
However, adopting Mastodon involves a certain learning curve, beyond the registration process, which is not very different from registering a new email address. The difference in this case, with respect to other social networks, is that the user himself must select the instance (the server) from which he will access. Continuing with the email example, it would be similar to being able to choose which provider appears after the @ after the name.
This would be the first change, notable with respect to the rest of social networks, the very structure that identifies the user and what is usual on Twitter or Instagram, under the following formula:
@Username
In Mastodon the user is identified with the following structure:
@[email protected]
in a parallel with email addresses:
[email protected]
Through its own website, Mastodon offers a partial list (although numerous) of these instances to which the user must connect to reside in them his account, but with the existing proliferation also there are communities and interest groups that are organizing their own instancesmaking them known through web pages or social networks, so it would be enough to know the identification of said instance to be able to join it.
Nor should the fact that later another instance be discovered that is more interesting for the user, who will be able to “jump” from one to another and become linked to another of his choice, should cause concern.
Mastodon has its own official server (Mastodon.social) but there are more than 4,000 servers that can be consulted from Instances.social, which provides information on language, theme, number of users in each of them, as well as other resources.rules that can be established autonomously by each instance, such as if it allows the publication of sexually explicit content or spoilers of movies and series. All these indications usually appear in the information section of each instance.
Exists within the platform a search engine for instances that allows them to be filtered by geographic location, language, theme… In any case, once the instance has been chosen, either through the website or its app (available for iOS and Android), the user can register by simply requiring provide a username, password and email address.
Once the user is registered in the instance of his choice, he will be able to start configuring his profile in a very similar way to any social network, but also to follow other users. Mastodon has a very similar operating structure to Twitter, which includes the ability to “retweet” contents of other users to share them with their own followers
Since a significant percentage of new Mastodon users come from Twitter, there are web tools that will be very useful for them.locate Mastodon users who are followed on Twitter to automate the process of following them on this new platform as well. These are services such as those provided by Debirdify or FediFinder, which will help you get started with Mastodon.
