Mastodon and Fediverse
A potential twitter alternative for global muslim ummah
What is mastodon?
Mastodon is a free and open source decentralised twitter like microblogging social media platform where a user can toot (tweet) and share it with his followers.
What does free and open source mean?
Free and open source software abbreviated as FOSS is a software whose source code is publicly available for anyone to modify, edit and publish.
What does Decentralised mean?
Decentralisation is a concept which means a property, software, technology, asset or database which is not owned by a single entity rather it is controlled and managed by a community of people and they are free to administer it as they please. Decentralisation is the opposite of centralised software, property, technology, asset or database. In centralization the asset is controlled by a single entity or organisation. For example Meta controls facebook, Google controls youtube & open ai controls chat gpt.
What does fediverse mean?
Fediverse is a collection of decentralised software which aims to replace traditional social media platforms.
Traditional Social Media platform Fediverse alternative Twitter Mastodon Youtube Peertube Instagram Pixel Fed Reddit Lemmy Facebook Hubzilla / Friendica
What benefits decentralised tech can have?
As it is not owned by a single entity the community can decide the rules as they please so the centralised entity which is non-existing can not dictate any rules or policy. In other words, our platform, our rules. No more shadow banning and censorship of ideas.
What are some problems with existing traditional social media platforms?
Existing social media platforms are owned by a single entity, corporation or organisation and they allow only those narratives that suit them and suppress the voice of the opposing side. Or governments / law enforcement agencies can force them to take down some content of people who are criticising state policies.
How can we use mastodon to connect muslims globally?
As Mastodon is free and open source which means we can self host an instance of mastodon on our server and potentially we can invite anyone from all over the globe to join our platform and connect with us and exchange their ideas.
What costs are associated with self hosting mastodon?
The upfront cost which is associated with self hosting mastodon is of hosting server. We don’t need any development initially as code is already available and we can go live at any moment but we might need a few people or a small team to constantly manage, support and maintain our server. We can hire dedicated people or have volunteers for this. Now coming back to the cost, as per our initial estimate we need only $20 to $25 to host a small instance of mastodon which can accommodate around 800 active users.
Shall we abandon traditional social media platforms and switch to fediverse?
Ideally yes we should invite more and more people to fediverse but realistically speaking this is not possible because traditional social media platforms have already created a user base or fan base and most people will be reluctant to shift to fediverse because they might not gain the same traction on fediverse as they are getting on traditional social media. But to connect Muslim ummah at a global level we can use fediverse as a tool and side by side we can keep using traditional social media platforms as well to raise our issues to the global community.