I would say it is a twitter clone. I do not know why it has picked up
popularity recently. Ikey over at the Solus project thinks it is a reaction
to the fear that Google+ might go away.

On Tue, Apr 18, 2017 at 10:58 AM, Matthew Crews <mattcrews@mattcrews.com>
wrote:

> How is Mastodon different from Diaspora, or for that matter the myriad of
> other, small, social networks not named Facebook or Google+?
>
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