As outrage at the alleged ‘bias’ of Twitter India’ # 039; …

An alternative social network called Mastodon is getting new users from India lately. So much so that its founder Eugen Rochko published a special message to welcome everyone. What exactly is happening and why are people suddenly subscribing to this not-so-popular social network?

As reported by The Hindu, Mastodon’s gain on Indian users comes from the suspension of Supreme Court attorney Sanjay Hedge’s Twitter account. After some of his tweets were reported, the microblogging site suspended his account. After his suspension, Hegde joined Mastodon and said he will use the platform going forward. Several Indian journalists and activists began “migrating” to the open source microblogging platform in protest of Twitter’s handling of its alleged “bias”. It resulted in a snowball effect and people started moving to Mastodon, some even claiming minimizing your use of Twitter.

    As Twitter Outrage Increases, Alleged Indies Bias Increases, Journalists And Activists Migrate To Mastodon - How To Join This Open Source Microblogging Site

Mastodon, also popularly called as an open source Twitter alternative.

What is the mastodon?

Obviously, it’s an ad-free alternative social network where you can perform all the basic social media activities. This includes posting text, images, videos, and links. However, its implementation is different from other social media companies. It is open source and decentralized, which means that a single entity or server is not running the data for the entire network.

Anyone can create their own Mastodon server to their liking and customize it. Each of these servers is called an “Instance”. A popular analogy used to explain this concept is email. If Mastodon is “email”, then an instance is an email provider. Essentially, all the various instances will provide the Mastodon service to their users. Creators can apply their own rules to their instances, and the community can moderate it too. This feature alone makes it more effective to deal with trolls on the platform. One can join multiple instances with the same account and continue posting to them.

How does it work?

Mastodon is quite similar to Twitter, so if you’ve already used the latter, it should be easier to understand. Tweets are called “Toots” and the privacy settings allow you to keep your account public, not listed, or just for your followers. Unlike Twitter’s 280 character limit, its toots are limited to 500 characters. Other users can be mentioned by their usernames in their toots and it can also contain media, links and hashtags.

All toots appear on a chronological timeline and you can respond to other toots normally. Instead of “Retweet”, Mastodon calls it “Boost” and it can boost other toots, or also your own touch. Like honking your own horn. You cannot name a horn that can be a good deterrent for others not to control it. Users can use favorite toots just like the other platforms. However, it won’t list all your favorite toots like Twitter.

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You can mute, block, and inform other users. Reporting to someone will send the report only to the moderators of that instance. Informed users will be reviewed and there may be no action, only a warning, or they may be excluded from the Instance. This works much better than waiting for a global team of moderators to review reported content like that on Facebook or Twitter.

There are three timelines which include Home, Local, and Federated. Your Home timeline lists the users you follow and the Local timeline lists everyone’s postings in that Instance, regardless of whether or not you follow them. In the federated timeline, toots from all instances are loaded, which also acts as a good section for discovery.

Instances are denoted as an address or domain that looks like ‘mastodon.social’ or ‘mastodon.technology’. When you want to join an instance, you must know the exact domain that needs to be entered. Some are public and you will need to submit a request to private bodies. You can only enter if the moderators pass your request.

How to join?

As a starting point, we recommend that you join the ‘mastodon.social’ instance. Go to his official website and create your account. After registering, you will be asked to confirm your email. There is not a single official Mastodon client, but several of them created by the community. The client applications are present on all mobile operating systems, including Android, iOS, and SailfishOS. It is also present in the form of web tools and desktop clients on Linux, macOS, and Windows. The website has listed some of these apps. For Android, we recommend Tusky and Toot. on iOS

If you want to discover more instances, visit the website and click “Start”. You will be moved to the section where multiple instances are listed. Search for your preferred instance using the Category and language drop-down list. Join in and fill in the details where the private instances will ask you to explain why you should be allowed into the community.

Who to follow?

Twitter user Shubhodeep Pal has created a thread of various activists, lawyers and journalists who have created a Mastodon account. The thread also lists the usernames of those people so you can follow them. When you are inside Mastodon, you can discover more people by searching with the hashtag “#india”.

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