Mastodon may look like Twitter, but it's fundamentally different. And that's a good thing.

Refugees from Twitter’s ongoing meltdown are flocking to Mastodon, a federated micro-publishing platform that lets you toot and follow, just like Twitter. But unlike Twitter, which is like cramming every participant into the same dingy sports stadium where they can shout over each other while the most annoying ones flash up on the Jumbotron, Mastodon is a collection of neighborhoods. And this is what will keep it from devolving into another online quagmire.

"I don't see Twitter disappearing, but I do see it dying as a community. Like other social media sites that use engagement as a determining factor for their algorithms, content has turned to 'angertainment' and anger culture to determine what gets seen, making Twitter a very difficult place to be," new media producer and social media heavyweight Ashley Ryan told Lifewire via email.

The biggest misconceptions about Twitter are that it is a social network and that it is a community. It is neither. Twitter is a publishing platform with about as much community as a subway platform during rush hour.