Social Media and its influence

Twitter’s been combatting harassment for years. The latest effort: quelling its horde of anonymous, hostile egg accounts. But for many users, Twitter’s abuse problem has long since undermined its value as a platform for creative communication. That’s what makes Mastodon—a free, open-source, and increasingly popular six-month-old Twitter alternative—so intriguing.

Mastodon has created a diverse yet welcoming online environment by doing exactly what Twitter won’t: letting its community make the rules. The platform consists of various user-created networks, called instances, each of which determines its own laws. One instance could ban sexist jokes and Nazi logos, while another might practice radically free speech. (In this way, Mastodon is not unlike a network of discretely moderated message boards crossed with a Tweetdeck-like interface.) Users choose for themselves which instance they want to join and select from a host of privacy and anti-harassment settings.

Oh, and the character limit is 500, not 140. In essence, Mastodon is an experiment in whether individually moderated communities can make a social network like Twitter more civil.

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New social media site Mastodon potential cyber-security tar pit | #Awareness 

http://www.scoop.it/t/social-media-and-its-influence/?&tag=Mastodon

A new social media network named Mastodon popped up a few months ago and is designed to deliver a decentralised, open-source experience, but its this unique structure that may make its members vulnerable to cyber-attacks.

Malwarebyte's researcher Zammis Clark blogged that the decentralised nature of the site's construction, which he said helps eliminate ads, a primary selling point for users, also leaves the social network open to hackers. The site is very different from Facebook, Twitter and other networks.
Instead of being hosted by a corporate entity on its server system Mastodon members can set up their own server if they wish, called in “instance” by the Mastodon community, and then have people join Mastodon through that server. But here is where the problem arises.

Each person's “instance” receives a special domain name, for example mastodon.instance1, and anyone registering on that instance would receive a username like johnsmith.mastodon.instance1.

Where things go awry, Clark said, is the usernames can be replicated across all the "instances", so on mastodon.instance2 there could be a johnsmith.mastodon.instance2. This creates a situation where there are no verified accounts.

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http://www.scoop.it/t/securite-pc-et-internet