The Twitter alternative – Mastodon

Following billionaire Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, the fiasco that followed prompted many longtime users to leave the social media platform. Many alternatives have since then been developed and gained momentum – including Jack Dorsey’s BlueSky and Mastodon.

Quite similar to Twitter, I didn’t seem to find much change in signing up or the interface of the app, which pretty much replicates Twitter features. Mastodon claims to be a decentralised open-source network that doesn’t use an algorithm feed and sell its users’ data, unlike Twitter.

Around 70,000 users quit Twitter for Mastodon, the platform has not become popular, partly due to its technical faults in the app, confusion on how it should be used and the small number of people that joined the network.

Though the platform has improved significantly over the year, with better performance and fixing many of its technical errors and glitches, many users still find it difficult to navigate and often leave the platform because of lack of known celebrities and personalities using the platoform.