Twitter Vs Mastodon: Does This Social Network Have A Future?
If you work in marketing, you have to know where the users are going. And at the end of 2022, they seem to be going anywhere that’s not Twitter. I am exaggerating, of course, but you can’t deny that Elon Musk’s new plaything has lost quite a few notable names. And where are they going? Sometimes nowhere. Sometimes, they choose the closest best thing, which seems to be Mastodon. But what is it, and is there really a Twitter vs. Mastodon fight on our hands?
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Twitter vs. Mastodon: Nature abhors a vacuum
Let’s get this straight: Twitter is very much still alive and still in the game. It’s still a behemoth, and that’s not changing soon. But, as it happened with Facebook, many big-name users are starting to feel iffy about the whole thing. It’s hard feeling optimistic about a network run by a hyperactive billionaire with questionable morals. And that’s where Mastodon comes into play: created in 2016, it touts itself as a decentralized, free, and open-source social media that’s kinda like Twitter but not really.
Being open-source, it first garnered positive comments and then negative ones. Why? Because as a platform, it can be used by everyone, including right-wing groups. But that’s what being free means, and Mastodon stands by its philosophy.
What’s different? First of all, Mastodon doesn’t use algorithms to promote posts; all of them are in chronological order. There are no ads, too — the platform is crowdfunded. It looks like Twitter, but the general feeling is different: it’s separated by servers with their own rules and communities.
Twitter vs. Mastodon? Not anytime soon. That means there’s no real reason to think about changing your marketing strategy: it’s too niche of a platform to care about. For now.