No one could have predicted that Twitter would evolve to become one of the most important communication channels of the early 21st century. Even Twitter’s original developers weren’t certain at first what it would turn out to be—or how it would make money.
Of course, a good part of the reason for Twitter’s success is precisely that it wasn’t a solution to a specific problem. Like a programming language, Twitter was a flexible medium in which its users could decide what problems they wanted it to solve. By not narrowly focusing Twitter on a specific use case, and by making it easy, convenient, and fun to participate, Twitter’s developers, wittingly or not, sowed the seeds for its explosive growth.
Twelve years on, the novelty has worn off a bit, and Twitter’s phenomenal growth trajectory has slowed. Part of it is market saturation—pretty much everyone on the planet who wants or needs a Twitter account already has one. A growing factor, however, is the unease among some users regarding Twitter’s use of their personal information, photos, tweet contents, and more, in an effort to maximize its advertising revenue. Advertisers want to target their messages to those most likely to respond, and are willing to pay top dollar for the privilege of reaching those specific potential customers. Twitter is sitting on tons of data that enable advertisers to do just that, and not everyone is comfortable with it.
Hence the motivation for a new, Twitter-like service called Mastodon.
The backers of Mastodon describe it as an open-source, decentralized, federated microblogging platform. Let’s unpack that.
Under this model, Mastodon is not funded or motivated by advertising, so users can toot (the Mastodon equivalent of “tweet”) with impunity, knowing that what they say cannot be used by third parties to sell them stuff.
In addition to its guiding principles, Mastodon has a few nice features:
In addition, the only part of the content that is searchable is the hashtags; thus, hashtags are more important in Mastodon than they are in Twitter.
So, is Mastodon better? It depends on your perspective. Users who dislike the targeted ads in Twitter or who have other privacy concerns will be enthusiastic about Mastodon’s ad-free, decentralized philosophy. But those who want easy access to the wide-ranging audience in the Twitterverse may be turned off by Mastodon’s more fragmented ecosystem, organized around individual instances with smaller communities serving narrow interests. It’s unlikely, for instance, that celebrities or major political figures with outsized egos will take to Mastodon.
Perhaps that’s the best part.