(Trends Wide) — Since Elon Musk took over Twitter, the number of people signing up to the small social network Mastodon has increased significantly.
Many may not have heard of Mastodon, which has been around since 2016, but is now growing at a rapid pace. Some are running away from Twitter or at least looking for a second option to post your thoughts onlineas the popular social network faces layoffs, controversial product changes, a new approach to content moderation and a surge in hateful rhetoric.
It also may not yet be clear what the alternative is to Twitter, a unique and influential platform that is fast-moving, text-heavy, conversational, and news-oriented. But Mastodon fills a few needs.
The service looks similar to Twitter, with a timeline of short updates ordered chronologically rather than algorithmically. It allows users to join a large number of different servers run by various groups and individuals, rather than a single central platform controlled by a single company like Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook.
Unlike the larger social networks, Mastodon is free to use and free of ads. It is operated by a nonprofit organization led by its creator, Eugen Rochko, and receives funding via microfinance, also known as crowdfunding.
Rochko said in an interview Thursday that Mastodon has gained 230,000 users since Oct. 27, when Musk took control of Twitter. It now has 655,000 active users each month, he said. Twitter reported in July that it had nearly 238 million daily active monetizable users.
“Obviously, it’s not as big as Twitter, but it’s the biggest network that’s ever been,” said Rochko, who originally created Mastodon more as a project than a consumer product (and, yes, its name was inspired by the heavy metal band Mastodon).
Who is joining Mastodon?
Mastodon is free open source software for running self-hosted social networking services.
The new registrations on Mastodon include some Twitter users with large followings, such as the actress and comedian Kathy Griffinwho joined in early November, and journalist Molly Jong-Fastwho joined at the end of October.
Sarah T. Roberts, an associate professor at UCLA and faculty director of that university’s Center for Critical Internet Research, began using Mastodon in earnest on October 30, just after Musk took over Twitter. Her (She said she had created another account years ago but didn’t log into it until recently due to Twitter’s popularity among academia people).
Roberts, who worked at Twitter as a staff researcher earlier this year while taking leave from UCLA, said she was inspired to start using Mastodon because of concerns about how Twitter’s content moderation might change under the control of Musk. But she suspects that some newcomers are simply fed up with social media companies hoarding a lot of user data and being ruled by advertising.
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And he noted that Twitter users can migrate to Mastodon because the user experience is quite similar. Many of Mastodon’s features and layout (particularly in its iOS app) will look and feel familiar to current Twitter users, albeit with slightly different verbiage. You can follow others, create short posts (there is a 500 character limit and you can upload images and videos), bookmark or repost other users’ posts, etc.
“It’s as close as you can get,” he said.
Feeling like a newcomer to social media
I’ve been a Twitter user since 2007, but as the people I follow on the social network have started posting their Mastodon usernames in recent weeks, I got curious. This week, I decided to check out Mastodon for myself.
There are some key differences, particularly in how the network is set up. Because Mastodon user accounts are hosted on a large number of different servers, the costs of hosting users are spread across many different people and groups. But that also means users are spread all over the place, and the people you know can be hard to find. Rochko compared this setup to having different email providers, like Gmail and Hotmail.
Elon Musk.
This means that the entirety of the network is not under the control of a single person or company, but it also presents some new complications for those of us used to Twitter, a product that has also been criticized over the years for be less intuitive than the popular Facebook and Instagram.
On Mastodon, for example, you have to join a specific server to register, some of which are open to anyone, while others require an invite (you can also build your own server). There is a server operated by the non-profit organization behind Mastodon, Mastodon.social, but it is not accepting any more users. I’m currently using one called Mstdn.social, which is also where I can log in to access Mastodon on the web.
And while I can follow any other Mastodon user, no matter what server they signed up to, I can only see the lists of who follows their Mastodon friends, or who their Mastodon friends follow, if the followers belong to the same server with the one that’s signed up (I figured this out while trying to track down more people I know who signed up recently).
At first, I felt like I was starting over, in a sense, as a newcomer to social media. As Roberts said, it’s quite similar to Twitter in terms of looks and functionality, and the iOS app is easy to use.
But unlike Twitter, where I can easily engage with a large audience, my Mastodon network has less than 100 followers. I suddenly had no idea what to post, a feeling that never comes to me on Twitter, perhaps because the size of that network makes any post feel less important. I quickly got over it, though, realizing that Mastodon’s smaller scale can be soothing compared to Twitter’s endless stream of stimulation.
An escape door from social networks
However, I’m not quite ready to shut down my Twitter account. For me, Mastodon is a kind of social media escape door in case Twitter gets unbearable.
Roberts hasn’t decided yet whether to shut down his Twitter account either, but he was surprised at how quickly his Mastodon following grew. Within a week of signing up and notifying his nearly 23,000 followers on Twitter, he amassed over 1,000 Mastodon followers.
“It could be that very soon people don’t want to be stuck on Twitter,” he said.
In some ways, starting over can be fun too. “I thought, ‘What will it be like to start over?'”
“It’s kind of interesting: Oh, that person is here! Here is so-and-so! I’m so glad they’re here so we can be together.”
