Twitter is falling (atleast for the liberal left) and people are moving to a federated alternative called - Mastodon. It's one of those open source projects which is out there for a long time.
Earlier social media was in control of liberal left so none of the press and media bothered to look at Mastodon, Friendica, Diaspora and others. Now that Elon musk is driving the strong left lobby out of Twitter, it's time for them to look at the different options.
A lot of people are pushing for Mastodon, however I feel Hive is a good alternative to any content creator, writer, blogger and the indiehacker who happens to write longer, shorter content in variety of forms (audio, video and text).
So let's compare Mastodon with Hive.
Mastodon's Decentralization
Mastodon is an open soruce federated social network which is decentralized and supported by the volunteers who happened to maintain the pods. Each pod would transmit the content and ActivityPub protocol will connect other pods to fetch and transmit the data.
Nobody is in control of the protocol so there is not much censorship except server owners and can ban and remove users if they wish. But apart from that on political and religious grounds there is no censorship.
No one person controls the mastodon, hence the decentralization.
Hive: If you compare the Mastodon with Hive, everything on Hive goes to a blockchain and the frontend owners get to access the content through respective form. Here the decentralization exists in frontends, witness and also on the ownership of account.
Mastodon's Censorship
There are some ways the content can be neutralized on Mastodon with the help of the server owner and also the owners who choose to block certain users based on their data. But that's not really a strong censorship of opinion, it'd be reserved for extrene cases of explicit content or some violations.
In comparison to the Hive, where the downvotes and cleaner groups tend to keep an eye on the abusers and vote them down. This in turn helps reduce the content issues on the Hive.
Mastodon's Rewards
In one word: None. Hive offers Hive dollar and Hive power when you write content here. With mastodon you earn nothing. It's just an alternative to the twitter. And way to promote your content to gain the followers of the federated social network.
Technical Barriers for Hive and Mastodon
There are some things common for both hive and the mastodon. And on those front there is nobody better than the other.
- Hive and Mastodon both are not meant to be easy to setup for non-technical users. It's not like 1 click WordPress setup.
- Mastodon's federation concept is not easy to grasp for non technical users, just like Hive's multiple frontends and the blockchain's forever existence of that data.
- Hive's keys are super important and can be difficult for newbies just like trying to remember the pods of the Mastodon from where one is supposed to post content.
- Hive has learning curve to understand HP, wallet, exchanges etc. Mastodon too requires an effort to learn conversation in the federated protocol.
Which one is better?
If you are a writer, blogger and content creator, hive is a lot better place than the Mastodon. You are not going to earn any rewards on Mastodon nor you would be able to do much marketing for your content, products or work that you do there due to federation pod limits.
Give both of them a try. Stay on Hive.