Before we go on, it would help to know what Mastodon is. Some would say it’s a Twitter clone, but there are enough differences that it’s really quite a bit more than that. Yes, the interface looks very much like Tweetdeck: there’s a vertical timeline, you can retweet (known in Mastodon as a “boost”), favorite (stars instead of hearts) and posts have a funny nickname (they’re “toots” instead of “tweets”). But a few features really set it apart.
Toots have a 500-character limit instead of 140, you can set content warnings per post by hiding sensitive content behind a “show more” button (some users have taken to using it as a joke setup mechanism) and you have way more privacy options. Posts can be totally public, private (only your followers can see it) or unlisted — which means it’s still viewable to the anyone who goes to your profile page, but it won’t show up in the public timeline.
![](https://s.aolcdn.com/hss/storage/midas/ccaec4eec73346701c1aafef7acb7f8a/205137510/mastodon.png)
But the key differentiator from Twitter is that Mastodon is a free, open-source protocol that’s distributed across multiple “instances,” so there’s no centralized server. It’s not really a traditional social network in that sense. Each instance has its own set of users, but you can still follow and interact with users from others. A “local timeline” only shows posts from your current server, but a “federated timeline” shows posts from yours as well as the instance of the people you follow (There’s a more succinct explanation of it here).
One of the benefits of having these multiple instances is that each can set its own rules. For example, the main instance, mastodon.social, has a strict policy of no Nazis, no racism, no sexism, no xenophobia and no discrimination, which can be seen as a direct result of Twitter’s inability to handle harassment and abuse. The one that I’m on, mastodon.cloud, just has one rule for now, which is to not be a jerk. Other instances could very well set their own rules too; it’s entirely up to the local admins.
“I was a heavy Twitter user since 2008,” says Rochko. But Twitter kept making bad decisions, he says, like changing Tweetdeck, closing down a third party app ecosystem, adding ads and even introducing algorithmic timelines. “Twitter was really trying hard to be not-Twitter,” he says.
Read the rest of this great story at www.engadget.com
Mastodon.com.au is scheduled to launch this week in Australia