If you have been following what happens on Twitter in the last couple of days, you may just facepalm yourself.

The drama with Twitter and Elon Musk already goes for a couple of months and it shows very clearly the weakness of centralized media: they are in full control of one person or a small group of people, and this owner can change anytime.

I never had an account on Twitter or any other social media platform, but this week I decided to try out Mastodon, which is a decentralized social media platform; that means that there are a lot of different servers you can join and all of them can communicate to each other. Hell, because of the use of the ActivityPub standard, they can even communicate to any other platform using this standard, like Peertube and Pixelfed.

Only now I realized how much more sense this model makes for social media: due to division into individual servers, small communities with similar interests can form, which are easy to moderate; and due to the uniform standard everyone can still keep connected to everyone.

As for my own experience, I’m really impressed with Mastodon right now. And this is not due to the technical workings or features (here and there I find some corners that are a little inconvenient), but because of the amazingly warm and welcoming community there. It feels like a space where friends come together to chat and share their opinions; no annoying companies which try to sell something and manipulate you. I was also amazed how many of the people and organisations I follow elsewhere on the internet are over on Mastodon.

As a conclusion, I want to refer to the discussions about BeReal earlier this year: a lot of mainstream media seemed to portray it as “the new better social media”, which, in my opinion, however, is absolute b***sh*t: it has the same corporate-controlled and centralized model and even then it is doomed to fail: it brings no revenue (at least, I’m not aware of how they make money), however, if they add more features and ads, it won’t be distinct from other mainstream social media anymore; it will become just another Instagram; if they keep it like it is, people will get bored and quit, as it is just a trend, which will disappear again.

That’s why the future is open-source, free and decentralized: join Mastodon right now and follow me at @alexcoder04@techhub.social!