Due to unpredictable future of Twitter as a private company of Elon Musk, a large migration of Twitter users to other platforms began. Among the available alternatives, the decentralized social network Mastodon whose audience only in the last week it increased by a third and already has more than 655,000 active users, a large percentage of which are, in particular, Twitter users.
Is this social network still free?
In the last few years, Ukrainian Twitter users have often used the following expression: ““I remind you that this the social network is still free” to emphasize the presence of wide freedom of expression in tweets and free access for everyone to this social network. But with the change of ownership of Twitter Inc. there is a significant reduction of employees, in particular, the department that was engaged in moderation, and in the coming months this may all change, because at least some users, in particular, verified accounts will have to pay a subscription fee (although the previous owners talked about the possibility of introducing a fee as early as 2020).
Mastodon was created as a free social network whose server software is completely free, developed by a community of users. Thanks to this, anyone who wants to can join the expansion of the network by creating their own server that will communicate with already existing servers thanks to the common protocol ActivityPub, and as of today we know of more than 3840 active servers created by different people around the world.
A new Mastodon user just needs to register on one of the existing servers — and access to the rest of the users registered on other servers will be granted automatically. But how to choose a server? It is best to choose the nearest server whose administrators you can trust.
October 4, 2022 Public organization “Internews Ukraine” officially announced the launch of several regional Mastodon servers in Ukraine at once within the project dComms, the purpose of which is to provide alternative methods of communication in conditions of censorship, interruptions and restrictions in the Internet. In fact, these servers were created back in August-September 2022, in particular, local ones were launched in the respective cities:
Additional local servers that are currently still hosted on server equipment in Kyiv:
These are not the first Mastodon servers in Ukraine: the oldest (UA Fediland) was launched in May of this year, and the newest (Vinnytsia social network) just a few days ago.
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