Myths About Mastodon

If you’re new to the federated social network, this is for you.

Mastodon began as a personal project by Eugen Rochko, but blossomed into something so much more. Yes, it is a way to fight back against Elon Musk’s takeover of twitter, but it’s also something exciting in its own right. This article is about explaining, in the simplest terms, what Mastodon is and how it works.

Let’s get a few things out of the way as quickly as possible:

Mastodon is served by a non-profit organization that continues development, it is entirely crowdfunded and currently makes a measly $144,000 per year from its Patreon. That’s not a lot when it comes to developing something as incredible as Mastodon.

Mastodon doesn’t run ads and doesn’t have big corporate backers. There are no shareholders. There is no single company that holds all of your data.

These are points I’ve seen floated by people new to the idea of Federated socials. People are either fearful of signing up for just another Tumblr/Facebook/Twitter, where their hard-created social communities can be just suddenly destroyed. I get that! But the whole point of Mastodon is to avoid just that sort of thing from occurring.

MYTH: Mastodon is a collection of individual servers, and you have to pick which one you want to be a part of: nope! This is absolutely not true. By joining ANY Mastodon server, you instantly have access to all the other servers. The more friends you make, the more people you connect with, the stronger and larger the network.

If you join a server called @mastodon.scifi-fanatics you can still interact with your friend who joined @mastodon.fantasy-fanatics. You can add one another as friends, you can share one another's posts, and you can see what the other person is publicly reblogging.

MYTH: My data is at risk with a Mastodon server in a way it isn’t with a big tech company like Twitter! Firstly, no. Your data is at risk in the same way — but there’s even less chance someone is profiting by selling your life as a commodity to hungry advertisers. Of course, the truth is complex, as it is with all internet software. But, ultimately, the way Mastodon works allows you to be potentially far more secure.