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.
