Mastodon stomped onto the scene this week instantly generating some buzz as the anti-Twitter. It looks and feels like Twitter. but is not a part of it.
Mastodon is a free, open-sourced messaging platform that’s decentralized in the extreme (more on that later) and, since it lacks an SMS heritage, does not have a 140-character limit — 500 characters are just fine. It also offers public accounts, lots of post-level privacy controls and fully chronological timelines.
Mashable tech reporter Jack Morse declared that all the cool kids are joining. So I, being neither cool nor a kid, decided to dive in.
I registered on the upstart social media platform using, as I always do, my full name: “LanceUlanoff” to protect it from potential social media identity poachers (they’re everywhere).
Actually, I’m not sure where I registered. Mastodon is so popular right now that it can’t support all the potential users on one platform, so there are dozens of them, all interconnected. When I registered, I scrolled to the middle of the list hoping that others might choose from the top instead and found Mastodon.cloud. After that, registering was pretty easy, as was figuring out the simple, if clunky, mobile-web-based interface.
What I failed to realize was that I registered in what is, in truth, a closed-off room in the rapidly growing Mastodon house. At this moment, it’s unclear if people in one room, or instance, can see people in other instances of Mastodon. That’s why Shatner’s search for me turned up nothing.
There is nothing intrinsically wonderful about Mastodon aside from the fact that it’s not Twitter and, more importantly, is not a part of a public company that needs to make money.
Perhaps it’s no coincidence that people started talking about Mastodon on the same day that Twitter lost its huge NFL live stream contract to Amazon (they don’t even have a social network). It’s a tough moment in Twitter’s ongoing quest to pivot to on-air-all-the-time media streaming service (with 140-character tweets still pumping along in the background).
