Elon Musk, the billionaire and serial entrepreneur, is the richest man on Earth, and that he has acquired Twitter.
Following his $44 billion acquisition of Twitter and becoming the "Chief Twit" of the company, the billionaire made a series of changes.
This includes the reinstatement of Kanye West's account, and former U.S. President Donald Trump's account.
While Musk certainly has lots of fans and followers who would do anything to support his idea, many others don't.
After Musk fired many of Twitter' staffs and sent many advertisers fleeing, Mastodon stood up.
The free and open-source software wants to become the Twitter alternative, by becoming something Twitter couldn't do.
And among the things, is being decentralized
Mastodon.social has microblogging features similar to the Twitter service.
But unlike Twitter which is a platform governed by one policy, Mastodon can have a large number of independently run nodes, known as instances, in which each of the nodes can have its own code of conduct, terms of service, privacy policy, privacy options, and moderation policies.
Many servers have a theme based on a specific interest. It is also common for servers to be based around a particular locality, region, or country.
The social media considers each member a Mastodon instance, in which the member would provide their own server, which can then be interoperate as a federated social network.
Being decentralized, this approach allows users on different instances to interact with each other.
The approach is meant to give users the flexibility to select a node whose policies they prefer, but keep providing them the access to the larger social network.
Mastodon's mascot is an elephant-like animal.
After all, the name "Mastodon" comes from the animal mastodon, which is an extinct animal that resembles a mammoth. This animal with a trunk can be seen on its logo, among others.
This is also why posts on the platform were originally called "toots."
Read: 'Twitter Is Alive': Elon Musk Responded To The #RIPTwitter Hashtag Trend
Since Mastadon wanted to become a Twitter alternative from the very beginning, the social media resembles Twitter in several ways.
For example, Mastodon has a user experience similar to TweetDeck, a social media dashboard application for management of Twitter accounts. TweetDeck was an independent app, before it was acquired by Twitter. Users can also share short-form status messages for others to see, in a similar fashion to "tweets" on Twitter.
In a standard Mastodon instance, messages can be as long as 500 characters, which is a huge bump over Twitter's 280 character limit.
But since Mastodon is open sourced, numerous Mastodon servers have forked the source code to allow an even larger character limit.
And also like Twitter, Mastodon includes a number of specific privacy features, like giving users the ability to choose whether the message is public or private. Public messages display on a global feed, known as a timeline, and private messages are only shared on the timelines of the user's followers.
In all, Mastodon uses community-based moderation, in which each server can limit, or filter out undesirable types of content.
Mastodon was first created in October 2016, and was only made to the public in April 2017.
But at that time, it was extremely small and unknown, and had yet to attract enough users to make it seen.
While Mastodon experienced a number of user spikes, the greatest happened after Elon Musk purchased Twitter.
After Musk's acquisition became final on 27 October 2022, Mastodon experienced an increase of 70,000 new users from the fiasco at Twitter on 28 October alone.
Daily downloads also increased from a mere 3,400 daily downloads on 27 October to 113,400 on 6 November 2022.
About a month later after Musk's acquisition, in early November, Mastodon had around half a million users.
It's worth noting that in October 2021, Donald Trump founded Truth Social, which is based on Mastodon.