Science and Technology
Context: Amid concerns over the direction that Twitter seems to be taking after its takeover by billionaire Elon Musk, a number of users are flocking to a platform called Mastodon, a decentralised, open source social media platform.
About Mastodon:
- Mastodon was founded in 2016 by a German software developer.
- Unlike Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and Instagram, it is a decentralised, open source, ad-free platform that is essentially made up of thousands of different servers, or “instances”, run across the world.
- All the different instances on Mastodon can communicate to each other, that is, what users in a certain instance are posting is accessible to users in a different instance.
- Users or organisations can even start their own servers.
- Otherwise, there’s a list of servers which focus on specific locations or topics of interest.
- The admin of each server can decide the content moderation guidelines for that particular server.
- It essentially means that anyone can download, modify and install Mastodon on their own server.
- The developers of the platform don’t own the copyright.
- However, if someone creates a platform using Mastodon’s code, they will have to acknowledge the source of the code.
Content moderation on Mastodon:
- Since Mastodon is a collection of thousands of different servers, there is not a singular content moderation strategy for the entire platform.
- Content moderation is done by admins of each server who can set their own rules — this means that a kind of speech allowed on one server may not be allowed on a different one.
- Users can also migrate to other instances on Mastodon.
Source: Indian Express
Previous Year Question
Q.1) Consider the following communication technologies:
- Closed-circuit Television
- Radio Frequency Identification
- Wireless Local Area Network
Which of the above are considered of the Short-Range devices/technologies? (2022)
- 1 and 2 only.
- 2 and 3 only
- 1 and 3 only
- 1, 2 and 3
