The Evolution of Social Media


Over the past few months, drastic changes at Twitter have meant that the social media platform has struggled to market itself to investors and the metaphorical money pit yearns ever deeper. Many people, sensing the crash of the giant just over the horizon have decided to try and broaden their own.

Whilst alternate social media platforms rise and fall almost daily, none has gathered enough momentum to become a viable replacement.

A challenger approaches

Mastodon is the popular solution to the problem despite boasting ~2m active users in contrast to Twitter's reported hundreds of millions. The primary issue with moving from one platform to another is that the features don't map one to one, as some users might come to expect from something that may replace the faltering behemoth.

The open-source nature of the app will allow it to adapt to users, similar to how the mobile app was coordinated. Using the project's funds to engage consultants for improving the user experience.

What Mastodon has certainly proven is that decentralised can work with a bit of effort.

The most important feature of the federated platform though is the ability for users to move between instances with little hassle. This allows users to move to an instance that might align more closely with their own interests or move away from those that don't. I, myself have moved from the popular aus.social instance to hackyderm.io which has a large community of developers.