After Twitter put a  $42,000-per-month API fee for enterprises into effect, the WordPress Jetpack service dropped its Twitter connections, ending automatic posting of TidBITS articles on Twitter. Curious if he could sort out a free replacement, Adam Engst dug around and pieced one together. 

Current releases of Mastodon clients look and work essentially like apps for Twitter, with a chronological timeline of posts. Can Mastodon’s open architecture let clients advance beyond the Twitter paradigm?

With centralized, ad-driven social networks in disarray and suffering from misinformation, harassment, and declining users, can the long-simmering Mastodon microblogging system offer a distributed future for conversation and community?

A growing set of services let users on independently operated servers interlink with standard, open-source protocols for microblogging, photo sharing, and dozens of other purposes. Could the Fediverse be a solution to the ugliness of commercial service algorithms designed to drive outrage and titillation?