Social media can be a hard business to run, just ask Google and Twitter as they have found it a challenge. Some social networks explode into immense popularity and then fizzle out over time, like MySpace. Others become wildly popular but fall out of favor yet still barely manage to hang on to their users, which is where Twitter seems to be. Mastodon Social is a new social network idea built on open-source that hopes to topple the Tweet. Mastodon Social is already making promises that have sent droves of Twitter users to sign up for their services.
UPDATED (04/05/2017 09:22a ET): We’d like to clarify that Mastodon Social is not a company but free open source software and instances do not need pre-approval but can get blacklisted if required. Thank you slipstream/RoL
The company promises that users will be able to use more characters than Twitter allows (500). Users are being told there will be less abuse and harassment along with better privacy and no advertising on Mastodon Social. These promises have been heard loud and clear, so much so that the company has had to halt sign-ups through their website to deal with the influx. Mastodon Social was created by Eugen Rochko out of Germany because he was upset over Twitter’s new algorithm. That algorithm embraced the Facebook approach of an out-of-order timeline where Tweets were no longer in chronological order.
Mastodon Social has seen over 40,000 users sign up in just two days. The company runs the platform on something it calls instances, which can be run by anyone (assuming approval by Mastodon). Running things this way is a traditional open-source method and helps spread the load across servers, though Mastodon’s main server is closed until they can manage the capacity.
Mastodon is a free, open-source social network. A decentralized alternative to commercial platforms, it avoids the risks of a single company monopolizing your communication. Pick a server that you trust — whichever you choose, you can interact with everyone else. Anyone can run their own Mastodon instance and participate in the social network seamlessly.
It will be interesting to see if Mastodon is successful, many social media channels start with a bang but fizzle out quickly.
What do you think of Mastodon Social’s attempt to topple Twitter? Let us know in the comments below or on Google+, Twitter, or Facebook.
[button link=”http://www.news.com.au/technology/online/social/social-network-mastodon-takes-on-twitter-promising-more-characters-privacy-and-control/news-story/ee1f445a423b4f439f5b2e6b593e7a5a” icon=”fa-external-link” side=”left” target=”blank” color=”285b5e” textcolor=”ffffff”]Source: news.com.au[/button]
