Mastodon, the federated social networking service that allows users to create their own private networks, made it clear that it won’t be incorporating support for non-fungible tokens or NFTs on its platform. The platform has been vocal in its stance against microtransactions enabled by NFTs and in a reply to a Twitter user on the platform said that “Mastodon will never support and/or create NFTs”. The move comes just days after Discord CEO Jason Citron suffered a serious backlash from the community for hinting at a possible integration of Ethereum-based wallets.
Although often seen as an alternative to most of the more popular social media platforms, Mastodon is certain about its anti-NFT stance, contrary to the likes of Twitter and Facebook who have hired entire teams to look into tech innovations in the crypto space.
Mastodon has, earlier, cleared the air about how the term ‘decentralisation’ doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with “blockchain, cryptocurrency or NFTs“. Therefore, users of the platform were elated to learn that the platform does not intend to introduce any form of micro-transactions to the platform.
The development comes days after Discord co-founder Jason Citron endured a severe backlash from crypto-sceptics when he posted a screenshot from an internal test version of the Discord app, hinting at a possible integration for Ethereum-based wallets. The main folks behind the popular chat/ community app Discord have had to put their crypto integration plans on hold as a result of the backlash, that went as far as some users threatening to end their Discord Nitro subscriptions.
Mastodon was founded in 2016 by a German coder named Eugen Rochko. It’s among a wave of social media projects that have sprung up in the last several years as alternatives to Twitter and Facebook, which have long drawn complaints about polarised discourse, harassment, inconsistent moderation, and a business model of selling user data to advertisers.
What sets Mastodon apart is that it serves as a codebase that anyone can use to create their own social media network. As such, Mastodon includes thousands of independent online websites and servers called “instances”. Everyone logs onto the specific instance that they’re a part of via any of a number of compatible third-party apps.