Urviech, heavy metal band – or what? If you want to say goodbye to Twitter, you’ll quickly end up with “Mastodon”. The network is everything that Twitter is not: decentralized, open, not hungry for data octopuses and (still) very friendly in dealing with each other. Who is behind it – and what can Mastodon do?

In the fall of 2016, German programmer Eugen Rochko finally had enough of Twitter. The social network became more and more similar to Facebook. Since the beginning of the year, an algorithm has also sorted the stream of news. The service moved further and further away from the ideal of free communication.