Elon Musk’s arrival at Twitter has caused a wave of dismissals and resignations in the social network that endangers its future. For fear that it will disappear, several alternatives have emerged with Mastodon as the main one highlighted by its similarity to the bird’s net.
It’s not exactly the same as Twitter, but it has a similar appearance and similar features, such as followers and following, the reduced space for ‘tooting’ – as the action of tweeting is called there – or retweets.
Signing up can be somewhat more complicated than it is on Twitter, but we explain step by step how to have a Mastodon account in case the worst omens finally come true.
We go to their website or their mobile application and choose the option to create an account.
The first thing that will appear to us will be the great difference between Mastodon and Twitter, the servers. We will have to choose one, which is usually differentiated by the topics it deals with.
However, the choice is of secondary importance and that is that, regardless of the server where the account is hosted, we can follow any user, regardless of the one he is using.
To choose server we will take your theme into account, their rules -each one has their own- or directly where our friends are. The difference only means that we will read about a certain topic depending on the chosen server, but let’s remember that this does not mean that we cannot follow anyone in the world with a Mastodon account.
Once we choose a server, it is enough to fill in the account information: username, password, email… depending on the chosen stay, they will send us a confirmation email or not.
Once we have created our account, we will realize that the operation is similar to Twitter, both from the web and from the application that is easily found on Android or iOS.
we will have a time line very similar to Elon Musk’s networkwith a tab in which we will see what the people we follow write, a local one in which we can read the tweets -or toots- of the people who are hosted on the same server, and a global one in which we can see all the people content from any server.
We can also limit the visibility and privacy of our tweets depending on whether we want any user to read them, or only the people on our server or those we follow.
In short, Mastodon, which these days is growing unstoppably in followers, is the most similar alternative to Twitter in case it ends up disappearing.