Elon Musk. This man is a role model for hundreds of youth of the world. Every entrepreneur working in the field of technology aspires to be successful like Elon Musk. Elon Musk single-handedly turned the tide in car manufacturing by creating the Tesla company. Tesla gave a whole new experience to car enthusiasts around the world. In its wake, all car companies had to experiment with electric cars. A business that no one thought of going into at one time has not only ventured into the business of space but opened the direction of space business by providing services to NASA.
Today, SpaceX is doing a great business. Musk’s company Starlink is a big player in the satellite internet business today. Elon Musk is known to the world as a visionary entrepreneur who wants to establish a colony on Mars. Not only that, this man born on Earth has a unique desire to take his last breath on another planet. Millions of his fans complain that this man, who thinks better than the businessmen of the world, has become thinking like other businessmen who have taken the plunge in social media after buying Twitter.
Since Elon Musk didn’t buy Twitter, he believed that Twitter could play a much more important role as a social media platform than it currently plays. Musk finally bought Twitter last year for $44 billion, but the Twitter deal has been mired in controversy for months, insisting that Twitter has the potential to become the largest and most important platform for expression. In the period from April to October-2022, there were many statements from both sides. At one point Musk announced that the deal was off. After the case reached court, Musk suddenly and dramatically closed the deal.
After Musk finally took ownership of Twitter, the controversy grew rather than lessened. Several top executives and employees, including CEO Parag Agarwal, were sacked. Retrenchment still hangs over countless employees. Elon Musk is making a lot of changes to Twitter. The edit button has added a lot to multimedia posts, Blue Tick paid subscriptions, increased tweet word limits, etc. More will come in the future. Elon Musk wants to make Twitter a superapp. Musk’s wish is to turn Twitter into V-Chat. It won’t be surprising if everything from payments to e-commerce is launched in the near future.
But the very freedom of expression that Musk championed before he became the owner of Twitter is now snarling him. Twitter and Musk were heavily criticized for blocking Twitter accounts of some journalists. The fact that Musk, who was talking about freedom of expression, would block the accounts of journalists on Twitter, shocked many people. A lot of people started leaving the Twitter platform during the controversy over buying Twitter. He started checking out alternative platforms and found them – Mastodon.
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In 2016, the Mastodon platform was created. A 22-23-year-old software developer named Eugene Rochko decided to create a decentralized social media platform and officially announced his success in March-2016. A decentralized social media platform means that it is managed from open-source rather than managed from a single location. A centralized social media platform is usually controlled from a specific server. It has a special code of conduct. Such social media platforms like Twitter-Facebook-Instagram etc., which are controlled by a company, with specific policies.
But decentralized social media has its own code of conduct. It runs on open source. Operates independently. It is being claimed that users get more freedom than social media. Mastodon is one such platform and now competes directly with Twitter. Since the Twitter controversy continued, Mastodon’s number of active users has continued to grow.
Eugene, the creator of Mastodon, claims that this platform is becoming more and more popular and people are coming to it as an alternative to Twitter. More than two and a half million people have joined Mastodon in the last month alone. 93 languages are supported in this platform. The number of daily active users of Mastodon has reached 18-20 lakhs. The platform has a total of 29 lakh users and this number is expected to increase 5 times in the next one year.
Well, thought the number of users is not that big. Many media websites or apps have a wealth of more than 1 crore, the number of users of the platform that wants to be an alternative to Twitter is negligible, but given the way users are constantly active on this platform, advocating for an open-source social media platform, it will increase in the future. It will not be surprising if it becomes a popular and mainstream platform.
Currently, it cannot be considered as an alternative to Twitter. Twitter has 33 crore monthly active users. Twitter is a trusted and popular platform. Governments around the world make important announcements on Twitter. Top leaders are active on Twitter but Mastodon is rapidly gaining popularity among the younger generation. The fact that users are switching to Mastodon instead of Twitter is a sign of change. It will be too early to say whether Mastodon will become an alternative to Twitter or not, but it will not be surprising if a new trend of decentralized social media platforms comes in the world instead of centralized platforms! If that happens, Mastodon will be a trendsetter.
– Harit Munshi