Mastodon is a free, open-source social network. A decentralized alternative to commercial platforms, it avoids the risks of a single company monopolizing your communication. Pick a server that you trust — whichever you choose, you can interact with everyone else. Anyone can run their own Mastodon instance and participate in the social network seamlessly.
We’ve seen Twitter clones before. App.net was a straight up monetized incarnation that showed so much promised but failed to gain any real traction leading to its ultimate demise.
Decentralized, open-source social networking is nothing new either. The most prominent of those, diaspora*, was a Facebook clone launched to capitalise on the continuing bad press Facebook were receiving over privacy and security concerns years ago.
Mastodon marks the first iteration of a decentralized Twitter variant (that I’m aware of) and whilst it’s the talk of the town today (43k users growing at 5k+ per day) can it grow to truly challenge the ever ailing Twitter?
Source: mstdn.io – Mastodon