india

Updated: Nov 09, 2019 00:20 IST

New Delhi: Twitter faced a deluge of migration from Indian users to Mastodon Social, an open-source social media site which has a strikingly similar interface to the former, after Supreme Court lawyer Sanjay Hedge’s account (@sanjayuacha) was suspended twice by it.

Mastodon creator Eugen Rochko said on the site on Friday evening that 12.9K new users had joined the site this week. “Don’t know off-hand how the numbers for the fediverse at large look,” he said. “Fediverse”, a portmanteau of ‘federation’ and ‘universe’, is used to mean the interconnected servers that the site allows. Users from any other social media site can intercommunicate on the site. Users also complained that Twitter followed a caste bias, and for the last few days prominent users like Hansraj Meena (@ihansraj) and Professor Dilip Mandal (@dilipmandal) have been protesting against it. Mandal has called for the blue ticks to be removed because, he said, the verification process showed a caste bias.

Congress leader Rahul Gandhi seemed to be one of the prominent political faces to have joined the site, even sending out two “toots” on demonetisation, with over 600 followers in the first hour.

However, both the party’s social media chief Rohan Gupta as well as Gandhi’s media advisor Nikhil Alva said that neither Gandhi's nor a new account of the party, that had cropped up on Thursday, were authorised ones. “We have reported those profiles. How can anyone appropriate them without a formal communication from the party,” Gupta said.

Due to the migration, Mastodon was trending on Twitter for most of Thursday and continued to be the top trend on Friday, too. Mastodon was created by Eugen Rochko in 2016 and has over 2.2 million users, a small fraction of Twitter’s 321 million users.

On September 5, to provide a sense of what he wants the site to be, Rochko has sent out a toot (the equivalent of a tweet on the platform) saying, “My dream for Mastodon is for it to be a viable choice as a publishing platform for any creator. In other words, for people to not feel like they’re locked in to Twitter or Instagram if they want to be professionally successful.”

Succumbing to pressure, Twitter India, late on Thursday night sent out a series of tweets to say that it is committed to “serving an open public conversation in India”. Prominent Twitter India user, Kerala government functionary James Wilson was one of those who migrated. He said that Twitter’s policies were questionable.

“Twitter would shadow ban users and revoke it later. But off late, they are singling out users selectively who are anti-establishment and restricting them,” said Wilson.