Listen, I am not saying jump ship. However, looking at what developments have been like since Elon Musk took over Twitter, things are not well. If you feel overwhelmed by the level of confusion and noise happening on that platform, deactivating is not the worst thing. If you want to quit, but not reeeeeally, here is an alternative. Mastodon is the Twitter ‘look-alike’ that will keep away from Twitter, with enough features to not miss Twitter.

Here is Mastodon, the Next Best Twitter Alternative.

How it works

Mastodon has microblogging features similar to Twitter. In Mastodon, you don’t join the platform itself, but more like a particular server run by an organization, individual, or group of individuals. These servers/nodes are also referred to as instances.

Start off your week with tech news recap and trending conversations in your inbox

Enter valid email-id

Subscribe

I prefer it on Telegram

Each Instance/server creates its own rules and regulations, which are enforced locally and not top-down, like corporate social media. It makes it the most flexible in responding to the needs of different people. It is also common for servers to be based around a particular locality, region, or country.

Go to the home page and click on the Servers link at the top of the page to decide which server you would like to join. Join a server with the rules you agree with, or host your own.

Each user is a member of a specific Mastodon instance which can inter-operate to allow users in different instances to interact with each other. It gives users the flexibility to select a node whose policies they prefer, but to keep access to a larger social network.

Bonus Features

Mastodon includes several specific privacy features. Each message has a variety of privacy options available, and users can choose whether the message is public or private. Public messages display on a global feed, known as a timeline, and they share private messages only on the timelines of the user’s followers.

Mastodon is crowdfunded and does not contain ads or controlling algorithm. You can follow anyone across any Mastodon server from a single account and receive their posts in chronological order. Posts on Mastodon are called toots (rather than tweets) and have a character limit of 500 characters.