Mastodon social adds policy against casteism as more Indian users join

Hundreds of users opened accounts on mastodon social last week, many of them accusing Twitter of casteism.

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Open-source microblogging platform Mastodon’s most popular ‘instance’ – mastodon.social – has added a policy against casteism to its rules. The founder of Mastodon and moderator of mastodon.social, Eugen Rochko, posted on the platform on Sunday: “As promised, mastodon.social code of conduct has been updated to add "casteism and advocation of casteism" to the list of explicitly prohibited offenses.”

This comes after several users migrated to Mastodon, and specifically mastodon.social, last week, after popular corporate-owned microblogging site Twitter faced severe criticism for turning a blind eye to casteist and communal discourse on their platform.

On Saturday, journalist Tejas Harad prompted Eugen Rochko to infact add casteism to the point in the code of conduct that can get a user suspended.

Hundreds of Twitter users have set up accounts on Mastodon, in protest against the policies of Twitter India. While it is unclear if people have deleted their Twitter accounts as well, there are several who are on both platforms, and encouraging more people to set up accounts on Mastodon.

Explained: Why #CasteistTwitter was trending and the company’s response

Mastodon is an open-source micro-blogging platform, where anyone can set up an ‘instance’ – a server – and set up the code of conduct and rules to be followed by handles on that server. Mastodon.social is the most popular instance so far. People can join any instance depending on their interests, and can continue to interact with people on other instances in the ‘Fediverse’. Each instance has its own moderators – making rules much easier to enforce.

Read: What is Mastodon and why scores of Twitter users are migrating to it