Everyone is talking about Mastodon at the moment – the free and open-source alternative to Twitter.Although at first glance it looks very similar to Twitter, it works in a very different way. Twitter is a highly-centralized system. Should you dare to tweet anything that offends whoever the boss happens to be - then you may find your presence on his platform is… limited. Or shadow-banned. Or something equally oubliette-ish.
That’s not possible with Mastodon, because it's a network of independently-run servers. There is no Mr. Big: therefore there’s no possibility of being banned from the platform. It’s not corporate-controlled social media – it’s user-controlled.
Mastodon has been around for seven years but has only recently seen a surge in growth and media attention.
Litopia has always been at the forefront of tech innovation (think about all the early podcasts we did) and so yes, we’ve just set up our own Mastodon server, which is now a constituent part of the 5000-strong network of Mastodon servers collectively known as the “fediverse”.
The hard part has already been done, i.e. setting it up.
Now it's over to you to experiment with! Will Mastodon overthrow Twitter - and could it become a valuable new way to discover authors and their works?
Sign up on Litopia's Mastodon server now and kick the tyres a bit!
