JAKARTA - Mastodon, which is predicted to be a replacement for Twitter, has just launched Mammoth, an application that makes it easier for users to join decentralized social media.
Now, Mammoth has just been supported by tech giant Mozilla, an open web supporter. He invested in the company's first general round with others, including Long Journey Ventures and Marc Benioff of Salesforce.
Mastodon, originally built by iOS developer Shihab Mehboob, maker of a number of apps, including unique music app Vinyls and Twitter client Aviary 2.
The last one was closed due to a Twitter API change led by Elon Musk, ending third-party clients and encouraging Mehboob to turn his attention to Twitter alternatives, namely decentralized Mastodon and open source.
Mammoth is the result of this effort, social media applications that are decentralized and open source similar to Mastodon.
But it has now been acquired by the company led by major developer Bart Decrem. Mammoth can only be used on iOS, it is not yet known for sure whether Android users can also try it.
The way I like to do something is you find someone special and then step aside and support their vision. I saw the spark in Shihab, and that's why we work together," Decrem said, as quoted by TechCrunch, Friday, March 3.
The two of them worked together when Decrem ran a small lab that had worked on a decentralization project, including a crypto application called KyrptoSign for legal documents on blockchain, as well as an art collective.
But when Mastodon came, the team turned around who later acquired Mammoth and now became the only focus of their work.
For Decrem, Mastodon's appeal is not only because he is a Twitter open source twin, something he thinks is just like a place where communities are formed.
"It reminds me of Firefox 0.7, which I took part in Mozilla Firefox launch. I'm like, there's just people with book here, doing cool things. It feels fun and interesting and everything I like about the internet community builds and manages themselves, "said Decrem.
This is half a microblogging, but half a person organizes a community like Reddit, or maybe like Discord. It's like a digital original social system. And it's decentralized. That's really cool," he added.
Furthermore, Decrem revealed, the amount of investment in the round was quite small, although it did not specifically mention the figures. However, Decrem has ambitions to attract 100 million active users in the future for Mammoth.
Now, the challenges for Mammoth, not only make decentralized social webs more attractive to more newcomers, but also have to succeed in maintaining and generating revenue from the app itself.
Going forward, Decrem plans to set the subscription plans available in a few months, ranging from $3 to $5 per month, at least half of which are likely to be used for Mastodon's server bills.
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