Mastodon is launched; Now everyone ‘Toots’ instead of tweeting

Now you can 'Toot' as well

| Published: Thursday, April 6, 2017, 11:43 [IST]

Twitter being the oldest social media app, people have been tweeting it since many years. If you are a kind of person who loves to tweet every now and then, now you got one more platform to do so. Yes, a new social media project called as Mastodon is introduced now which is said to have the potential to take on Twitter.

Mastodon is launched; Now everyone ‘Toots’ instead of tweeting

Though in many ways it looks like Twitter, it also has its own features which will surely grab the attention of many users. Like its newest rival, it allows users to create accounts, follow some people, and post status called "toots." But with a new name 'toots' instead of tweets, it tries to provide some missing feature in the popular Twitter platform.

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What is Mastodon?

First, let us look at the meaning of the word Mastodon. It is a species of currently extinct mammutid proboscideans. With such a unique name, it calls itself as a ‘ decentralized alternative to commercial platforms'.

That is, it avoids the risks of a single company controlling the communications you have over there. This platform is also a free and open source. When you are creating an account, it allows you to pick any server from the list provided. This is unique, though.

Reason behind this innovation

This new project is started by 24-year-old Eugen Rochko. He was not behind money but was pissed off with quite a lot of modifications introduced by Twitter from few years. That is the main reason for announcing this new service.

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Though this app may not be successful all of a sudden, but it is a known fact that many users may come out of Twitter because of its newly introduced paid service. So, this is the best time for Mastodon to pull users towards their platform.

Features of Mastodon

With a bundle of exciting features, few of them sets it apart from other social network platforms. Here the toots can be 500 characters long and offer good blocking and muting tools. With uncurated news bots, it also untags pornography and sexually content by providing per-post privacy setting.

It even untags gore and extremely graphic violence, racism, and sexism. Even the guidelines of this app clearly inform the user that it is not a platform for neo-Nazi communication. Other than this, it even has chronological timelines which were removed by Twitter long back.

Problems with Mastodon

With more than 41,000 users posting millions of posts, this platform has its own list of problems. As it is mentioned earlier, one has to log in using different servers which are provided while signing up.

These servers are having its own local timeline and will only be visible to the users on that instance. But since it is still in the early stage of launch, it may soon resolve this issue. On the other hand, the platform was forced to close all new registrations because of the heavy traffic caused by new users.

But whatever the case, the Mastodon is a free and non-commercial version of our old Twitter app which provides good privacy controls. So, let us give some more time to this new-born platform to create a standard on the internet.