Meet Mastodon, An Open Source Twitter Lookalike That Everyone's Talking About

Love Twitter but hate its 140 character post limit? Time to check out Mastodon.

It¡¯s the new kid on the social networking block, which alleviates some of the pain points associated with Twitter, with its own unique twist.

Its absurd name notwithstanding, Mastodon is suddenly finding a lot of takers from people who¡¯re tired of Twitter. That¡¯s great, but we still don¡¯t get why anyone would go through the trouble of joining yet another social network and invest precious time and effort in getting all their friends to the new platform. Why go through all that trouble? Yes, it¡¯s full of trolls but is Twitter really that bad?

Mastodon is the brainchild of 24-year-old Eugen Rochko, who seems to have love-hate relationship with Twitter. In a way Mastodon looks and feels like TweetDeck for Twitter (if any of you still remember it), but it¡¯s not a third-party plugin for Twitter. It¡¯s an underground, decentralized clone of Twitter with several features that Twitter lacks.

For starters, Mastodon allows users to post status updates called "toots." These toots can be up to 500 characters, and any random toot can be made private -- this is where Mastodon goes beyond what Twitter offers.

Since it's a decentralized, free and open-source in nature, several instances of Mastodon exist. Unlike on Twitter, where you go register and spend time on Twitter.com, Mastodon (which primarily resides on http://mastodon.social) has several different services which you can sign up and get active on -- you can find the entire list of Mastodon¡¯s public instances here.

It¡¯s like several different Twitter universes existing at different URLs where people can signup and still be able to talk to each other. Mastodon combines all its different public instances into a toot timeline visible under its Federated List option. This is the most open, visible and aggregated form of Mastodon.

According to The Verge, Rochko began working on Mastodon last year when Twitter began moving away from a purely chronological timeline feed. Rochko wanted to build a distributed system that lets you send public messages to anyone who follows you on the service -- the same way email works. The fact that anyone can create a server and host their own instance of Mastodon and still connect to the Federated List is the fundamental way in which Mastodon and Twitter are different.

Mastodon also claims to be anti-bullying and anti-trolling, and while those mechanisms may be in place and working well for a fledgling social network, we wonder how that claim will hold up once Mastodon starts expanding and starts getting increasingly decentralized. It'll be an immense challenge, no doubt.

Who will win in this battle between a prehistoric elephant and a not-so-tiny tweeting bird?