Here is a social networking platform that is slowly becoming visible in India. Many active social media users are liking it more and more of late. It's Mastodon, which is a free and open-source self-hosted social networking service.

What makes it so unique and so unlike Twitter, the most popular microblogging site? "Mastodon allows anyone to host their own server node in the network, and its various separately operated user bases are federated across many different servers. Unlike a typical software as a service platform, it is not centrally hosted. Each user is a member of a specific, independently operated server," says Wikipedia.

"This makes it possible for each operating server to have its own code of conduct, terms of service, and moderation policies instead," the source says.

A post made on Mastodon is called a Toot and it has a 500-character limit.

Says Nilanjana Roy, a user, "Mastodon is quiet like Ancient Twitter; we're all early(ish) adopters. It's so civil and so free of haters that it's a shock to the system. A reminder of how abuse on socmedia has been normalised, like pollution."