Sorry Twitter, lots of people are moving to Mastodon instead

A new social network named "Mastodon" after the excellent heavy metal band, rather than the hairy prehistoric elephant – is growing at an alarming rate, according to The Next Web.

It is actually like Twitter, but more so – there’s a 500-character limit on status update, and you can also set posts to private (something Twitter lacks).

The posts are known as ‘toots’, not Tweets – and it’s all very DIY, and anti-corporate, with users free to set up their own Mastodon ‘instance’ (like a community). It’s also (hopefully) free of the poisonous and abusive racism of Twitter – there are strict guidelins which prohibit, ‘racism or advocation of racism, sexism or advocation of sexism, discrimination against gender and sexual minorities (and) xenophobic and/or violent nationalism.’

The creator of Mastodon is Eugene Rochko, 24, from Germany, who says, ‘The entire network is like an unlimited number of different Twitter websites, users of which can follow each other and interact regardless of which Twitter website exactly they are on.

‘This has obvious benefits as there is no single company that has a monopoly. I brought all my friends to Twitter back in the day. I kept promoting it to everybody I knew. I really loved the service.But it continuously made decisions that I didn’t like. So in the end I decided that maybe Twitter itself is not the way to go forward.’

You can find out more at Mastodon.social – but we warn you, it’s impossible to sign up at the moment, due to massive interest in the site.