Ever since the richest person in the world took over Twitter, the social media platform has tumbled into utter chaos. While countless public figures including Gigi Hadid and Toni Braxton left the bird app citing a surge in hate and bigotry, the man at the helm—“Chief Twit” Elon Musk—is making up rules on a whim.

First tweeting “Comedy is now legal on Twitter,” then proceeding to suspend accounts mocking the billionaire, firing half of the company’s workforce, and even beefing with people rightly criticising his $8 per month subscription plan, it’s safe to say that the platform is nothing more than a dumpster fire beyond recovery.

As advertisers and users alike flee Twitter, alternative social media apps are increasingly being pushed into the spotlight—including Tumblr, Clubhouse, Amino, and Cohost. One of the latest additions to this list is none other than Mastodon, the decentralised network which has gained nearly 500,000 new users following Musk’s antics.

Founded in 2016 by German software developer Eugen Rochko, Mastodon is a nonprofit open-source app—meaning, its goal is to ideally benefit the public rather than its shareholders. Presenting a vision of social media that can’t be bought and owned by billionaires, it hence strives to create a more resilient global platform without profit incentives.

“We believe that your ability to communicate online should not be at the whims of a single commercial company,” Rochko wrote in a blog post, adding that one of the reasons he started looking into the decentralised social media space was rumours that Twitter, the platform he had been a daily user of, might get sold to another controversial billionaire.

“[This was] among, of course, other reasons such as all the terrible product decisions Twitter had been making at that time. And now, it has finally come to pass, and for the same reasons masses of people are coming to Mastodon,” Rochko continued.

On Mastodon, you can publish 500-character messages with pictures, polls, videos, and other media to your audience, and, in turn, follow interesting people and receive their posts in a chronological home feed. While these features may seem like a visual Twitter clone at first glance, the underlying system of the app in question is far more complex.

Unlike Twitter, Mastodon is decentralised—instead operating in a similar way to emails. Here, when you first create your account, you have to pick a community (or server) to join and the same is reflected in your username. For instance, if you sign up for Mastodon via its cat enthusiast server, your address would be [yourusername]@mastodon.cats.

But no matter which server you sign up with, you will be able to follow and interact with users from other providers—just like how you can use Gmail to email a Hotmail user and vice versa. “Anyone can become such a provider as Mastodon is free and open-source. It has no ads, respects your privacy, and allows people or communities to self-govern,” Rochko added.