If you are thinking about switching from Elon Musk’s Twitter, then this article might be helpful in making up your mind.

Twitter has been struggling since the famous takeover by Elon Musk. New policies, “blue check” verification badges for $8 per month, and countless bugs have just dented the user experience.

This situation has defected thousands of users, while many are discussing a possible alternate online platform.

Mastodon, one of the fastest-growing alternatives, can be a solution. It looks and feels a lot like Twitter.

The platform was launched in 2016 by developer Eugen Rochko, and it’s made up of many different instances, or servers, instead of being managed by one company on one domain name.

According to the Mastodon website, Mastodon has gained more than 1 million new users since October 27, now hosts 1.8 million monthly active users.

“We’ve hit 1,028,362 monthly active users across the network today,” Rochko tooted - Mastodon’s version of tweeting – earlier in November. “That’s pretty cool.”

What is Mastodon and how it works?

The platform claims to be “the largest decentralized social network on the internet”. It means, that it is built on open-source software that resides on Fediverse ­– an online universe of applications and websites connected by thousands of independent servers.

According to USA Today, currently, the company has 5,700 servers on the Fediverse.

Now you might be wondering how they are going to work. Unlike Twitter, which connects to one platform, in the case of Mastodon, you will first connect to one of these servers. The servers, which may also be referred to as “instances,” can be run by one person or a group and each may have its own rules for joining and how content is moderated.

Some servers let anyone join, while others are restricted to an invitation or require approval by an admin. Once you are on a server, you can see posts and messages from anyone across the entirety of Mastodon’s servers.

How it all started?

Eugen Rochko, the site’s founder and chief operating officer, in an interview with Forbes revealed that he began developing Mastodon in 2016 while at Friedrich Schiller University in Germany.

This was the same time rumors arose about a takeover of Twitter by Peter Thiel, who along with Musk helped create PayPal.

Being a frequent Twitter user, Rochko had grown “dissatisfied with the site, the company, and the platform” over how it was changing, he told Forbes.

This fueled Rochko to develop a new platform, which is not run or own by a single company. “It made me realize that the method of expressing myself online was too important to be in the hands of a single corporation that could do anything with it that it wanted without any recourse,” he told Forbes.

The platform has some similarities with Twitter, like following other users and groups, sharing photos, video and audio, using hashtags and boosting posts you like. But here you can also ‘edit your posts’.

Mastodon isn’t easy as it looks. Some of the users may find it hard to understand.