Becoming more decentralized: prefer Mastodon over Twitter

Hello all,

I've been meaning to write about Mastodon for a while, so here we go.

If you are in this crypto space, it's probably because you value the ideals of decentralization. Taking power back from the big evil corporations and big evil governments (which are almost always working together), and putting it back into the hands of the people, or, at least smaller companies and less evil governments, and still respecting capitalism, and also reducing censorship.

(Or you are here for the magic money, I know who you are.)

Anyway, if you are here for these reasons, then you should looking for ways to embrace more decentralized tools and try to get away from the evil big Tech.

Twitter ==> Mastodon

Twitter is a big tech company that censors and tries to shape public opinion according to the Deep State, or the Left or the Powers That Be. And sadly Twitter is very popular and probably not going away any time soon.

It was recently purchased by Elon Musk, who has arguably done some good by revealing some of the corruption there. But Elon Musk is an idiot and moron (really don't get me started), and is likely to run the thing into the ground. Something as big as Twitter is too big and important to be run by one guy or one single company.

Luckily there is an alternative (more then one, but I'll write about others later).

Fediverse

First, let me mention Fediverse. Fediverse is a group of federated servers that follow some protocol and provide some service, such as Web Publishing, Blogging or the like.

Mastodon is a part of the Fediverse.

Mastodon

https://joinmastodon.org/

Mastodon is a group of federated servers that can provide Twitter-like functionality. Each server is run by a different person or organization, each with their own set of rules and policies. But they can communicate with each other, so someone on one server can follow, and read and respond to posts from a different server.

Generally most servers to connect to each other, but there may be exceptions. A "bad" server might be shunned by other servers.

Also I should mention that Mastodon is fully open source, and one could run their own server, if they choose.

GPL code is here:
https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon

Federated, not decentralized

Just a note that Mastodon isn't a crypto, and there is no coin. (Not everything has a coin guys.) It's just a group of servers working together.

Pick a good server to join

One pitfall that one might encounter is that is it possible to be kicked off of a server. For example, if you have Right political views and join a very Left leaning server, then you could get booted. So don't do that.
And as I mentioned above, you could always create your own server if you don't like any of the options out there.