According to CEO and lead developer Eugen Rochko, Mastodon, the decentralized, free, open-source microblogging social media platform increasingly positioned as an alternative to Twitter, has surpassed the one million active monthly users mark for the first time in its history.
Mastodon, which uses a similar interface and social feed format to Twitter, has seen rapid growth since Elon Musk’s takeover, with nearly 500,000 users joining the network since October 27.
Rochko also explained that nearly half of the new users (489,000) have joined the platform since October 27, 2022, when Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter was completed, and that he has been working 12- to 14-hour daily to keep up with the influx of demand, as well as buying more powerful hardware to update Mastodon’s database servers.
Mastodon uses 500-character posts known as “toots” and offers a similar experience to Twitter, with features such as hashtags, replies, bookmarking and retweet-like “boosting.” Unlike Twitter, however, the network is ad-free and distributed across thousands of servers organized around interests and geographical regions. It is largely run by volunteers who connect their individual systems in a federation.
Some Mastodon servers do not have moderation rules, others do. Some servers have decided not to link to others that appear to be full of bots or have a large amount of hateful content, making them invisible to those on the servers where they are blocked. Posts can also be reported to the administrators of the server.
Musk’s acquisition of Twitter is said to have accelerated Mastodon’s growth.
The sources for this piece include an article in BleepingComputer.
