Meet Mastodon, the open source Twitter alternative that's spreading like wildfire The fact remains that Twitter is a closed source communication method on the otherwise open HTTP medium. Twitter clearly can't support all the crazy things people want to do with it, and has gotten rid of a lot of the features they once offered, and are frequently criticized for being simultaneously unmoderated and too restrictive. It's a microblogging platform in which any person or group of people can run their own nodes of communication, and also connect these nodes to one another for intercommunication. It solves the ownership problem in both the literal and emotional sense: the code, being open source (AGPL), is owned by everyone, and the nodes themselves are so numerous that users can shop around to find a community that best suits them, or start a personal node. Each node, being independently run and managed, can be used as a private node, or it can be open to other users, it can block users or feeds, or it can accept feeds. Control is truly placed in the hands of the users, and yet the end result is a truly social network. The best thing about it is that you can tether Mastodon and Twitter together to ease your transition. Part of the advantage of Mastodon is that there isn't just one Mastodon. The project itself owns and runs mastodon.social, but that's just one node in a much larger network. You can join any Mastodon instance that is accepting new users. There's a list of running instances on instances.mastodon.xyz. Read more at http://ift.tt/2ndXbjj
Comments