In this article we will tell you what Mastodon is, its unique features and the similarities it has with other social networks.
Since late 2022, everyone has been talking about Mastodon. This is due to various reasons, including the arrival of Elon Musk on Twitter and the various policies that the platform has implemented.
But what is Mastodon?
It is a microblogging social network that, for practical purposes, is very similar to Twitter: you can publish texts of up to five hundred characters, images and videos (as well as the use of tags and mentions of other users). Each post is called a Toot (which on Twitter would be a tweet) and you can like, comment on and share it.
Mastodon was created in 2016 by the initiative of Eugen Rochko , and its central characteristic is to be a decentralized network. What does this mean?
To use Mastodon, users can join one of many instances on the Internet. That is, instead of there being a single site to sign up for (such as twitter.com), there are many , each with their own policies and definitions about what kind of content users can share. However, when you join one Mastodon instance, you can communicate with users on other instances .
It's similar to what happens with email: you can create an account with Gmail, Outlook or Yahoo, and each of the companies behind those services will offer its own features; but they all use the same standard protocol: SMTP. Thanks to this, someone who uses Gmail can send a message to someone else who has an account with Outlook, or who has set up their own mail server with their own domain.
On Mastodon, that standard protocol is ActivityPub . And thanks to it, any china phone number server running a Mastodon instance can interact with other instances, and even with other platforms that also use the same protocol (such as Tumblr, or some Wordpress installations). Additionally, any user can set up their own server , with the advantage that both the protocol and the underlying software are open source.
In short, users can choose any instance they want and join it, without being prevented from interacting with other users on other servers. There are, of course, many instances to choose from, both general purpose and specific. On this site you can browse a directory to choose the most suitable one.