Twitter recently put a price on the blue tick and made it clear that it wouldn’t be the quality of your opinion but the $8 dollar bill that would pull people's attention. Elon Musk said tweets of those who don't pay the money will be suppressed by an algorithm and you’ll have to scroll really far to see unverified users. The Tesla boss, who is now the ‘Twit Chief’, didn’t just stop at selling the blue tick; he literally introduced 7 changes in 7 days.
With all this, Twitter now seems like a new turf whose future might be dismal and history depicts nobody wants to be on a sinking ship. No matter what, we can’t stop expressing ourselves, right? Fortunately enough, in the world we live in nothing is not irreplaceable. Thus, the hegira to Mastodon.
It does sound similar to Tolkien’s Mordor but Mastodon is not Sauron’s land, in fact it is the new talk of the town. An open-source social network that markets itself as an alternative to Twitter, the platform has drawn around 489,003 new users ever since Elon Musk took over Twitter on October 27, as of now Mastodon’s total monthly active users are over 1 million.
Mastodon publicises itself as a federated social network and users get to join ‘servers’ instead of signing up for an account on a website. On mastodon, each server is independent and can have its own norms around moderation. In the beginning, the platform may seem confusing and quite laborious but you can easily get a hang of it once you start using it.