In the wake of Elon Musk's acquisition of Twitter and its turbulent course in recent weeks, many users are migrating to the microblogging service Mastodon. Between October and November 2022, the number of monthly active users increased from 300'000 to 2.5 million. But what exactly is the advantage of Mastodon, and is its current popularity the start of a new trend or a short-term hype?
Mastodon is a federated network, which means that it is made up of many interconnected servers that different organizations and individuals run. Each server represents a community, which can set its topic focus, rules of conduct, or content moderation, allowing users to join a community that best represents their interests. Content can be exchanged within and across communities. However, some communities may filter content from another community, for example, because of hate speech. This distributed structure prevents power concentration: No single entity can change the rules of the entire network and thereby control the flow of information. Instead, decision-making authority is delegated to the individual communities.
Mastodon is part of a larger conglomerate of interconnected social media platforms - the so-called Fediverse. The Fediverse is based on the open ActivityPub protocol by the World Wide Web Consortium, allowing content exchange across social media networks. For example, Mastodon users can also comment and like videos or follow accounts of the video platform PeerTube from within Mastodon.
Still, several concerns have been expressed about Mastodon and the Fediverse. The decentralized structure of the network makes it harder to enforce rules and regulate content, which could result in the spread of harmful content. There are concerns that the Fediverse may not gain the same level of mainstream acceptance as other popular social media platforms, potentially limiting its overall influence.
Ultimately, the success of Mastodon and the Fediverse depends on various factors, such as their ability to continuously attract and retain new users, and their long-term financial sustainability. After all, a network's ability to achieve mainstream adoption also depends on the resources available to analyze and meet or even create new user needs. Still, the Fediverse can be considered a step towards the next iteration of the Internet (often called Web3) and a natural response to mainstream social media platforms like Facebook or Twitter, which have come under criticism for a variety of issues, such as the way they handle user data and their efforts to control the flow of information on their platforms.
Opportunities and risks of decentralized and distributed systems are also addressed in our recently published study «Hype or Help? Die wahren Vorteile von Blockchain»