Yet another (small) win for the Fediverse
With Elon Musk now heading up Twitter, one of the best social media apps (well, at least previously), and generally wreaking havoc, many users are looking for an alternative. One of the strongest candidates to attract attention has been Mastodon, a decentralized social network composed of multiple, “federated” independently-run servers that can connect with one another. The sticking point with it right now is perhaps the same obstacle facing every up-and-coming social network out there — adoption. But now Google, out of all companies, is getting started with a Mastodon presence.
Earlier this week, we started spotted posts from a Mastodon account that belongs to Google. Note our wording, though: this isn’t Google’s primary social presence, but instead, a new home for the Google Search Liaison account. There’s an official Search Liaison account that’s present on one of the main Mastodon instances, mastodon.social, as well as one for Google’s Public Liaison for Search, Danny Sullivan. It looks like both accounts are going all-in, even — their bios direct people to follow them on Mastodon for “the latest updates,” and tweets note they’re “cross-posted from Mastodon.”
While this is an enticing development for Mastodon’s believers, it also doesn’t necessarily mean Google is full-on adopting Mastodon. While the company may be concerned about Twitter imploding within the next few weeks, it doesn’t look like it’s moving away from the platform just yet. Still, the fact that a multi-billion-dollar company is establishing an official presence on Mastodon is encouraging for the platform’s prospects. We’d sure want to see more Google accounts over there to be more confident about this, though, which, at the moment, we don’t have.
If you want to keep up with the latest developments on Google Search, then it’s a good idea to follow this account on Mastodon — it sure looks like that’ll be its main place now.
In other semi-related news, did you know Android Police has a Mastodon too? Go follow us there if you made the jump from Twitter. We’re no Google, but we’re (occasionally) cool, too.
