What Is Mastodon, The Twitter Alternative?

Mastodon is free and open-source software for self-hosted social networking services.

Mastodon is open source and free; users can access it through a large number of third-party mobile apps, some of them free and others paid.

Mastodon seems a lot like Twitter, offering similar microblogging features with a 500-character limit on posts that appear in a real-time feed.

On mastodon more than five million user accounts have been created so far.

Since Twitter has over 390 million accounts, the service can be considered a comparatively small social network.