ZDNet article on twitter alternative Mastodon

Ditching Twitter? How to get started with Mastodon

Now that Twitter is under new (and controversial) management, a decentralized open-source alternative has seen surprising growth. Here's how the Fediverse works and how you can get started.
ed-bott
Written by Ed Bott, Senior Contributing Editor on Nov. 8, 2022
Reviewed by Alyson Windsor

Elon Musk's first few days as CEO of Twitter have been great news for one social media network. No, not Twitter. The unexpected breakout star of social media in 2022 is instead a free, decentralized, loosely organized group of servers that collectively make up the Fediverse, short for federated universe. And on the Fediverse, nothing is hotter right now than the open-source Mastodon software that powers the Twitter-like service that runs on that collection of servers.

Also: Why Twitter will fail shortly

It's difficult for most consumers to wrap their minds around the concept of the Fediverse, which has a lot of technical jargon and wonkiness associated with it. Arguably, though, it's not that different from the way modern email services work. Each server runs the same core software, and all the servers know how to talk to each other. Crucially, each user has an identity on a single server. If that identity is an email address at Gmail.com, you can exchange email messages with folks on other servers that support the same protocols.

Mastodon works like that, with one crucial difference. You can't go to a massive, centralized server run by a megacorporation to sign up. Instead, you have to find a server on your own, set up an account, and hope that the server you choose can handle the pressure as all these newbies sign up. For a hint of just how fast the Mastodon community has grown, look at the above chart assembled by Esteban Moro (@estebanmoro@mastodon.social), an MIT researcher and associate professor at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid.

Mastodon servers have been straining under the stress, with users reporting long wait times before an email confirmation arrives and similarly long delays in getting those accounts properly set up.

Also: How to delete your Twitter account

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https://www.zdnet.com/article/ditching-twitter-how-to-get-started-with-mastodon/