There has been a lot of talk in recent days about Twitter and Elon Musk’s intention to acquire it in its entirety to make changes that make it possible to become a positive platform where there is freedom of expression.
The truth is that Twitter is not the only social networking platform with a microblogging format on the Internet.
Among the numerous alternatives are Mastodon, a social networking platform that is similar to Twitter to the public but works similarly to email behind the scenes, for when it is not necessary to register on the same server to be in contact with those users who do belong to the same.
It is the equivalent of being able to send an email message from Gmail to those users who are registered in Outlook and vice versa, for example, but taken to the social networking segment.
The official Mastodon experience for Android is here
And it is that as we have come to comment, Mastodon is a decentralized platform for social networks, where each server is independent and can apply its own particular policies.
Thanks to this we have servers that support conversations in general, but also specific servers to share photos, be in contact with other programmers, etc., generating specific communities.
Each server is known as an instance, and will be related to each of them through the ActivityPub protocol, also implemented in other services of the so-called fediverso, among which is Pleroma (another alternative to Twitter) and Pixelfed (alternative to Instagram) .
Thanks to this, from Mastodon it is possible to follow the publications of those who are on any server or instance of Pixelfed and vice versa.
The most remarkable novelty of Mastodon today is that since now has its own official client for Android devicesinitially arriving at the Google Play Store, but with the promise of later arriving at F-Droid, one of the alternatives to the Play Store for open source projects.
From XDA Developers they comment on some shortcomings that are available in third-party clients, such as not having the display of the local timeline, that is, seeing only the community publications of the instance itself, although neither features federated timeline display.
In any case, it maintains similarities with the official version released on iOS last year.
Link: Mastodon for Android
