Swapping from Twitter to Mastadon
Hacker Thoughts: Everyone in Infosec is doing it, but should you?
Seems like everyone is leaving Twitter for another social media platform, and in the Infosec Community - that’s Mastadon.
Mastodon, a social network that allows you to post up to 500 characters, also allows you to add polls and photos to your posts, and you can limit who sees what you post.
Mastodon is completely free and open-source, so anyone can launch their own server and build a community. This allows you a lot more flexibility and opportunity than Twitter.
Mastodon is similar to Twitter, but it's decentralized. Instead of following a single account, users join a server, which is run by an organization, individual, or group of individuals. Each server has its own moderation policies and rules. Once a user has joined a server, he or she can post to the community of that server, follow others on that server, or create their own server.
Mastadon has a friendly atmosphere, and users let their guard down and can feel more like a small town than a large social network. It seems like a decent place to build (or rebuild) a community.
Like Twitter, Mastodon has features similar to Twitter, such as hashtags. Users can add attachments to their toots, edit their posts, and send targeted messages.
The main difference between Mastodon and Twitter is that Mastodon has server-specific channels, and users can share messages with the entire instance or with specific groups of users.
The main server I see Infosec peeps going to is https://infosec.exchange/about
Should I stay or go?
Try it out, see if you like it. One thing to be aware of is that Admins of Mastadon servers can read DMs (through SQL queries, but how hard would it be to build a tool for SQL searching/parsing?)
Why is this notable? Because the Admins of the server are people in YOUR profession, versus just the IT admins that don’t know you at Twitter.
Don’t get caught riding dirty in the DMs!