What Elon Musk Can Learn From Mastodon—and What He Can’t
WiredFreedom never comes for free. Musk wants to open source the platform’s algorithms, exile spam bots, and allow people to tweet whatever they please “within the bounds of the law.” To him, the stakes are nothing short of existential. “My strong intuitive sense,” he said in an interview at TED last week, “is that having a public platform that is maximally trusted and broadly inclusive is extremely important to the future of civilization.” Musk’s vision has fueled uncertainty about what the future of Twitter may look like. “Many people have come back to their old accounts following the news.” Rochko once found himself in a position similar to Musk's: He was a Twitter power user with some gripes. One early instance was based around a word-game community that excluded the letter “e.” Another instance, called Dolphin.Town, allowed people to communicate exclusively using the letter “e.” The federated nature of Mastodon allowed Rochko to skirt some of the common problems with social media moderation that have increasingly vexed companies like Twitter and Facebook.
History of this topic
Twitter down: Rival Mastodon sees huge increase in users as Elon Musk ‘destroys his site’
The Independent
German alternative Mastodon gets boost from newly restricted Twitter
The Hindu
Elon Musk says taking down accounts for posting Mastodon’s links was ‘a mistake’
The Independent
As Twitter backlash grows, rival Mastodon reaches 2.5 million monthly users
CNN
Meet Mastodon, the Twitter ‘killer’ Elon Musk is keeping an eye on
The Telegraph
Can Mastodon be a Twitter alternative?
Al JazeeraDiscover Related
)
