Disaffected Twitter users migrate to Mastodon

The Future. While Twitter descends into chaos, many users have already set up camp on a decentralized platform called Mastodon. Mixing some tenants of both Twitter and Discord, Mastodon has actually been around for a while but is just now finding new relevance. And with the platform being part of what is dubbed the “Fediverse” (part of a loosely interconnected ecosystem of decentralized social networks), Mastodon may be the gateway drug to a new kind of mainstream social media.

To the servers!
What’s the population of Mastodon in Twitter’s new Musk-era?

• According to Axios, downloads of Mastodon skyrocketed from 3,400 to 113,400 between October 27 and November 6… and is only increasing.
• As of Monday, it has over one million monthly active users. 489,003 of those were added since Musk officially took over Twitter on October 27.

In total, Mastodon, which was created by German software developer Eugen Rochko in 2016, has roughly 4.5 million users — still a long way off from Twitter’s 238 million.

Missing monarchy
With all this hubbub of people flocking to Mastodon, you may be wondering, “what the heck is it?”

• It’s a decentralized platform that is connected by a “federated” collection of servers — about 4,000 of them to date.
• The servers are categorized by interest and are controlled by an individual or group who have their own acceptance and moderation policies.
• Once you have joined a server, you are able to follow people on other servers — the server you join is just a starting point.
• And Mastodon isn’t controlled by an algorithm, so posts pop up in chronological order. You also have the ability to like, comment, and retweet. No DMs, though.

Mastodon also has two other features that make it fundamentally different from Twitter — it’s open source, so anyone has the ability to contribute code, and it relies on crowdfunding to stay operational, so there’s no advertising whatsoever on the platform.

And fun fact: posts are called “toots.” Amazing.