Instances, Toots and Fediverse: If you don’t know these words, you haven’t left Twitter for Mastodon yet. Many users have announced their desire to leave Elon Musk’s newly acquired app. And Mastodon could well become the land of welcome for people in need of a social network outside the orbit of billionaires (and above all free).
Created in 2016 by Eugen Rochko, a German programmer dissatisfied with Twitter, Mastodon resembles the well-known social network, at least in appearance. We thus find ourselves with a microblogging platform with short messages, surveys but also multimedia content.
However, some names and options change, with tweets here called “pouets” or “toots” depending on the user, and posts limited to around 500 characters.
A decentralized system
However, neo-mastonauts (name given to users of Mastodon) must adapt to the very specific workings of the platform. Mastodon is in fact a software that is part of Fédiverse. This somewhat fanciful term refers to a decentralized open source social networking system.
More explicitly, this means that the different entities are interconnected but do not depend on a single large company.
Thus, we find in Mastodon different “instances”, that is, independent servers that interact with each other but have different operations. By registering with Mastodon, you can choose an instance according to your interests (games, art, gastronomy, etc.).
Each of these instances will have its own precise basic rules, as well as its own moderation system, considered much more effective than on Twitter. Some instances list a few tens or hundreds of mastonauts, while others may group several hundred thousand users.
Objective: compete with GAFAM
But it’s not just Mastodon in the Fediverse. Peertube can be used by Internet users who want to do without Youtube services. Pixelfed will be an alternative for people who want to leave Instagram. The great advantages of Fédivers are, above all, the absence of ads and data recovery.
At the moment, the transition from traditional social networks to Fediverse applications is, to say the least, laborious. Mastodon still recorded a significant increase in its number of users after the announcement of the acquisition of Twitter by Elon Musk. On October 30, 70,000 new mastonauts were registered, according to a Mastodon tweet.
Today, Mastodon is said to have around 2.8 million users and over 2,500 active instances. This obviously falls far short of Twitter and its 436 million users worldwide. And the difficulty of understanding the social network, as well as its low attractiveness, will not necessarily improve the popularity of the social network. Proof that a mammoth is not necessarily stronger than a bird.
Source: BFM TV
