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Twitter, Mestadon

We Left Twitter and Joined Mastodon, You Should Too!

The State of Twitter

Since Elon Musk purchased Twitter for $44 billion back in late October 2022, the state of Twitter has been worsening as the new owner sends it into absolute chaos, and there’s no ignoring it, as many other active Twitter users are witnessing the downfall of the platform. Not only that, but many employees of Twitter have been layed off or choice to resign, let alone what Twitter is doing is not even legal:

“Twitter is now engaged in conducting mass layoffs without providing the required notice under the federal WARN Act,” the lawsuit says, referring to the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act that requires 60-day notice for certain plant closings or mass layoffs.

Source: Phil Helsel from NBCNews

With some of the rules being bent by Elon Musk, there’s a big concern over how the platform will be moderated. One of the main reasons individuals have left or began to wonder about quitting Twitter is their concern about “free speech” being emphasized over harassment and hate speech on the platform. Some people believe that since Elon Musk took over, hate speech has increased with no repercussions. Musk is even reinstating banned accounts, including the one belonging to Donald J. Trump. With these kinds of action, Twitter will loose advertisers, partners, and portions of their userbase.

Speaking of which, one of their advertisers Apple has already threaten Twitter that they will withhold them from the App Store. Making Twitter unavailable to install on Apple devices.

If true, there are reasons to believe the threat is related to potential changes to Twitter’s content moderation policies. Earlier this month, Apple CEO Tim Cook said he was “counting on” Twitter to continue moderating “hate speech.” In 2021, Apple removed the social media platform Parler from its App Store due to its dissatisfaction with the platform’s content moderation practices. And in response to Musk’s tweets, the decentralized content-sharing network LBRY said Apple demanded that it filter certain search terms on its apps or they would not be allowed in the App Store.

Source Aaron Terr from The Fire

Given everything that’s going on with Twitter, now is an ideal moment to make a choice. We, FalixNodes Limited, have choice to leave Twitter altogether as we don’t want any presense on Twitter.

Other sources to read from on the state of Twitter:

(Some of the articles listed were not fully read by the writer of this blog post, but does trust the source of The Verge and MacRumors.)

(All videos were watched by the writer and reviewed)

What Now? As Twitter descends into chaos, users are turning to other alternatives, one of which stands out: Mastodon, a free and open source decentralized social network.

Joining Mastodon

Created by Eugen Rochok in 2016, Mastodon is a free and open source decentralized social network. It’s made up of many instances(aka servers) that are not and can’t be controlled by a big entity like a big tech company or government. With this in-mind, we can worry less about our security and privacy when using a Mastodon network.

Of course, we would like to clear some things up, starting with the fact that Mastodon is not built to be a Twitter clone but still considered an alternative platform to Twitter. As Mastodon works differently compared to Twitter and to other major social networks like Facebook and Instagram. For starters, the search engine included in each Mastodon instance is not universal, DMs are done as private post let alone not encrypted(be cafeful, but plans to add an actual encrypted DM system is in the works), and other features.

Signing up for a Mastodon account is easy, you just need to find the right instance that fits you and the community you want to be a part of. Mastodon has a lot of servers, according to their stats they are over 8.8K at the time of writing. To narrow things down, Mastodon has a servers page on their official website you can check out and choose from there.

If you can’t choose, there are general use servers like Mastodon.social, mstdn.social, toot.community, social.vivaldi.net, and much more.

What if my friends are on a diferent instance? No worries at all, Mastodon is able to communicate with other instances thanks to a technology called ActivityPub. Well, what is ActivityPub? “Any software that likewise implements federation via ActivityPub can seamlessly communicate with Mastodon, just like Mastodon websites communicate with one another.” Source. Thanks to ActivityPub, you can also follow people from other websites that are not built on Mastodon. As an example you can follow people who have an account on a website that is built on either Pleroma, Pixelfed, PeerTube, Plume, or other decentralized platforms.

You can read more about what is Mastodon through their docs: https://docs.joinmastodon.org

FalixNodes Limited’s social media manager has choice the instance ran by the creator of Mastodon as our preferred place to have our Mastodon account, which is at Mastondon.social.

Where to find Falix staff on Mastodon:

Other Source on Mastodon:

(Some of these listed articles may be over 2 - 5 years old, it’s not listed in any order)

Also see https://joinmastodon.org/about