Decentralised social network Mastodon launches on Android for people sick of Twitter

If you’re sick of the Musk-Twitter standoff you might be happy to hear that Mastodon, the Twitter alternative, has now launched an Android app.

The decentralised social network was launched in 2017 for Twitter users sick of the abuse and hatred on the platform.

The open-source social network capitalised on the Musk-Twitter drama this week and launched a free Android app.

Mastodon is not a single website like Twitter but a network of users in independent communities that can set up their own guidelines.

The social network already had an iPhone app, web version, and several third-party services but launching on Android should only expand its user base.

At Mastodon, we present a vision of social media that cannot be bought and owned by any billionaire. Your ability to communicate online should not be at the whims of a single commercial company!

— Mastodon (@joinmastodon) April 14, 2022

Mastodon is like Twitter, but with a 500-character limit on ‘toots’ (their version of tweets), and you can also set posts to private (something Twitter lacks).

It has all your standard Twitter features like Explore, Notifications, Dark Mode, Sharing and Musk’s favourite one — Polls.

However, Mastodon’s feed is quite different from Twitter with its chronological, ad-free, and non-algorithmic approach.

The company is registered as a nonprofit and development is supported entirely by donations which means there’s no advertising or monetising your attention and the makers want ‘to keep it that way’.

Content warnings let you hide posts containing sensitive or triggering material until you’re ready to engage with them and each community has its own guidelines and moderators.

However, if we’re taking about absolute free speech, Mastodon’s code of conduct prohibits a broad range of bigotry which might throw some people off. But for that there’s Donald Trump’s ‘Truth Social’ that launched this year.

While Elon Musk’s fans think that he could make Twitter better with this free speech absolutism, Musk is not entirely innocent when it comes to censorship.

In the fallout, more users might be prompted towards a decentralised social media platform like Mastodon.

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