Let’s time travel back to December, a time when Elon decided he didn’t care for journalists anymore and laid down the ban hammer on a wide swath of the press corp. There were headlines (ironically) about the death of free speech on Twitter and many cried foul from the roof tops as they scrambled to find alternate micro blogging services from which to promote their work. Mastodon became that safe haven for more than just a few reporters, along with others abandoning the bird shop once and for all. It felt like a watershed moment in social media as one of the sacred towers of surveillance capitalism seemed ready to give way to a free and distributed system.
When Twitter quietly updated its developer policies to ban third-party clients from its platform, it abruptly closed an important chapter of Twitter’s history. Unlike most of its counterparts, which tightly control what developers are able to access, Twitter has a long history with independent app makers.
Mastodon, a decentralized microblogging site named after an extinct type of mammoth, recorded 120,000 new users in the four days following billionaire Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, its German founder Eugen Rochko tells TIME. Many of them were Twitter users seeking a new place to call their online home.
Today, Mastodon’s explosive growth in the face of Twitter’s collapse has made it a new UI playground, especially so on iOS. I’m following — and using — at least half a dozen excellent new iOS Mastodon clients, each of them distinctive.1 Mastodon has that small-nugget timeline nature as Twitter, but is a truly open platform. There are no limits to what developers can choose to do with the Mastodon APIs. There are, however, limits to what iOS developers can deliver to users: App Store review.
For the past few weeks, I’ve watched a growing number of people I follow on Twitter slowly migrate to Mastodon, a competing social network that looks a lot like Twitter.
