ZDNet: “Now that Twitter is under new (and controversial) management, a decentralized open-source alternative has seen surprising growth. Here’s how the Fediverse works and how you can get started…It’s difficult for most consumers to wrap their minds around the concept of the Fediverse, which has a lot of technical jargon and wonkiness associated with it. Arguably, though, it’s not that different from the way modern email services work. Each server runs the same core software, and all the servers know how to talk to each other. Crucially, each user has an identity on a single server. If that identity is an email address at Gmail.com, you can exchange email messages with folks on other servers that support the same protocols.Mastodon works like that, with one crucial difference. You can’t go to a massive, centralized server run by a megacorporation to sign up. Instead, you have to find a server on your own, set up an account, and hope that the server you choose can handle the pressure as all these newbies sign up. For a hint of just how fast the Mastodon community has grown, look at the above chart assembled by Esteban Moro (@[email protected]), an MIT researcher and associate professor at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid.”

• See also Wired – “What You Should Know About Switching to Mastodon. This week on Gadget Lab, we do our best to break down the social media platform many Twitter users are flocking to.”
• See also YouTube video – What is Mastadon