These are interesting times — if not the end times — for once pervasive, unstoppable social media platforms.

The two giants, Facebook and Twitter, are twisting in the whims of billionaire owners who are facing their fallibility for the first time, at the same time.

Facebook still dominates with 2.96 billion monthly active users, but Instagram is closing the gap, and with both owned by Meta, market saturation is a real problem. Worse still, neither app is a priority for founder Mark Zuckerberg. He’s all in on the metaverse, basically reinventing Second Life circa 2009, effectively writing off social media today for a cartoonish vision of the future.

His investors are skeptical. Meta stock is down more than 60% since Zuckerberg declared a new direction, and last week Facebook laid off over 11,000 workers.

Twitter, meanwhile, is a dumpster fire aboard a slow-motion train wreck, as Elon Musk basically (and reluctantly) bought the company for $44 billion as a joke.

Flip-flopping rule changes have led to a rise in hate speech and abuse, and cutting half the staff has led to troubling technical issues. Advertisers are withdrawing, lawmakers are threatening investigations and users are understandably fleeing.

The question is, fleeing to where?

The chaos has certainly validated the instincts of people who opted out of social media completely and has prompted more than a few to join their ranks. Honestly, this is probably the smartest option.

But what else is out there for people who still crave online communities, who still seek an outlet to express themselves, who still want to drink from a fire hose of news, views and personal updates?

Professionals still have Microsoft-owned LinkedIn, and it’s basically Facebook in dress shoes.

The younger set might return to Tumblr, which was the other microblogging serv­ice launched a year after Twitter. It has a lot more flexibility in what you can post than Twitter, and is owned by the creators of WordPress, another massively popular publishing platform.

There are also several “not Facebook” social media apps: Ello draws the arty set, VSCO is a slick Instagram alternative, blockchain-based Minds is drawing the “absolute free speech” set, while newcomer Counter Social promises a bot- and spy-free space. Fans of Donald Trump can gather on Truth Social.

But the biggest beneficiary of the Twitter turmoil and resulting exodus is the oddly named Mastodon social media platform.

When I last wrote about Mastodon in 2019, it had about 100,000 monthly active users. Since the Twitter takeover its usage has exploded to a million monthly active users. While still paltry compared with Twitter’s 300 million, a lot of people are clearly giving the pachyderm-themed service a shot.

For Twitter refugees, Mastodon is easily the most familiar, as it is modeled after Twitter. There’s a timeline with toots (instead of tweets), boosts (retweets), replies and favorites (likes).

What sets Mastodon apart, however, is that it is not a centralized, private platform, like Facebook or Twitter. It’s federated, which means it’s a sprawling network of independent servers that interact with each other.

Email is federated. I use Gmail, you might use Hotmail, your boss uses Outlook and your mom still has a Yahoo address. Even so, everyone can send an email to everyone else, because the underlying email system speaks the same language across the internet.

Mastodon works the same way. I signed up on mastodon.social. My friends use mastodon.technology, a community of tech nerds. Cybersecurity pros flocked to infosec.exchange, while journalists set up shop at journa.host. Cat lovers can be found on toot.cat.

You can pick a server because of its theme, community or just because you like the name. Each server has its own vibe, norms, inside jokes and rules.

Because Mastodon is federated, no one owner can shut down the network. If you don’t like the rules, you can move to another server. And most important, you can still follow, message, reply to and interact with everyone on any server, regardless of where you set up shop.

It’s not as simple as Twitter, and joining a new community is often a lonely affair. But now is probably the best time in a long time to give Mastodon a shot. I’ve set up a simple guide at HawaiiMastodon.com to help you get started.

———

Ryan Kawailani Ozawa is the Pacific news editor for Decrypt, a Web3 media company, and a publisher of the Hawaii Bulletin tech newsletter at HawaiiBulletin.com.