When Elon Musk bought Twitter nearly six months ago, bringing back white supremacists and booting off journalists who had criticised him, many users felt it was the right time to leave the platform.
Thousands of tweeters – myself included – fled to Mastodon: a scrappy social media project designed from its start in 2016 to be resistant against takeovers by billionaires.
Mastodon is decentralised: instead of a single website, it’s a network of thousands of independently run servers – each with their own moderators and users – who can interact with each other’s posts, called “toots”, using an open protocol called ActivityPub. Other social media services can connect to ActivityPub as well, so no one app can monopolise the broader network – the “fediverse” – that Mastodon is part of.
All that posed a bit of a learning curve. In addition to coming to grips with new terms, I had to choose a server, which would
