NEW YORK – Released in 2016, and yet still relatively little known, the Mastodon social network is experiencing a resurgence of interest that is surprising, to say the least. Since the announcement of Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, some of the platform’s users have shifted to this open-source social network.
Just hours after Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter was announced, there were already over 40,000 new users on the site. According to the “Mastodon Users” profile, the site has no less than five million accounts.
Entirely decentralised, Mastodon is a social network made up of thousands of interconnected communities, all unique, and each with different interests and their own rules.
Unlike Twitter, which controls its entire network, Mastodon is potentially hosted on as many servers as there are communities. Nevertheless, it has anti-harassment tools with moderators available if problems arise.
This open-source software is accessible from any browser or via a dedicated mobile application (on Android and iOS). Mastodon is essentially a collection of many sites or communities, federated to make one larger network.
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