In the week since Elon Musk took over Twitter, the number of people signing up for Mastodon, a small social network, has increased dramatically
Mastodon, which has been around since 2016, may be unfamiliar to you, but it is rapidly growing. Some are leaving Twitter for it, or at least looking for a second place to post their thoughts online, as the much more well-known social network faces layoffs, content moderation changes, and an increase in hateful rhetoric.
There may be no clear substitute for Twitter, a singularly influential platform that is fast-paced, text-heavy, conversational, and news-focused. Mastdon, on the other hand, satisfies a specific itch. The service resembles Twitter in appearance, with a timeline of short updates sorted chronologically rather than algorithmically. It allows users to connect to a variety of servers run by various groups and individuals rather than a single central platform controlled by a single company like Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook.
Mastodon, unlike larger social networks, is both free to use and ad-free. It is run by a nonprofit founded by Mastodon creator Eugen Rochko and funded through crowdfunding.
In an interview on Thursday, Rochko said that Mastodon has gained 230,000 users since October 27, when Musk took over Twitter. He says that there are now 655,000 users who use it every month. In July, Twitter said that it had almost 238 million daily active monetizable users.
"It is obviously not as large as Twitter, but it is the largest that this network has ever been," said Rochko, who founded Mastodon as a project rather than a consumer product (and, yes, its name was inspired by the heavy metal band Mastodon).
Who will be joining Mastodon?
Some people with a lot of followers on Twitter have joined Mastodon. Actress and comedian Kathy Griffin joined at the beginning of November, and journalist Molly Jong-Fast joined at the end of October.
Sarah T. Roberts, an associate professor at UCLA and the faculty director of the UCLA Center for Critical Internet Inquiry, began actively using Mastodon on October 30, shortly after Musk took over Twitter. (She had another account, she said, but hadn't really gotten into it until recently because of the popularity of Twitter among academics.)
Roberts worked as a staff researcher at Twitter earlier this year while she was on leave from UCLA. She said she was inspired to start using Mastodon because she was worried about how content moderation on Twitter would change with Musk in charge. She suspects that some newcomers are simply tired of social media companies that collect a lot of user data and are primarily motivated by advertising.
She also mentioned that Twitter users may migrate to Mastodon because its user experience is very similar to Twitter's. Many of Mastodon's features and layout (particularly in its iOS app) will be familiar to current Twitter users, albeit with slightly different verbiage: you can follow others, create short posts (with a 500-character limit and the ability to upload images and videos), favorite or repost other users' posts, and so on.
"It's about as close as you can get," she admitted.
Feeling like a newcomer to social media?
I've been using Twitter since 2007, but as more of the people I follow on the social network began posting their Mastodon usernames in recent weeks, I became intrigued. This week, I decided to give Mastodon a try.
There are some significant differences, particularly in the network configuration. Because Mastodon accounts are hosted on a variety of different servers, the costs of hosting users are distributed among a variety of people and groups. However, this means that users are dispersed throughout the network, making it difficult to locate people you knowosRochko compared this setup to having multiple email providers, such as Gmail and Hotmail.
This means that no single person or company has control over the entire network, but it also introduces some new complexities for those of us used to Twitter, a product that has also been criticized over the years for being less intuitive than more popular services like Facebook and Instagram.
To sign up on Mastodon, for example, you must first join a specific server, some of which are open to anyone and some of which require an invitation (you can also run your own server). The nonprofit that runs Mastodon is no longer adding new users to Mastodon.social. I'm currently using mstdn.social, which is also where I sign in to use Mastodon on the web.
You can follow any other Mastodon user, no matter which server they're on, but you can only see lists of who follows your Mastodon friends or who they follow if they're on the same server as you (I realized this while trying to track down more people I know who recently signed up).
At first, it felt as if I were starting over as a total newcomer to social media. According to Roberts, it looks and functions similarly to Twitter, and the iOS app is simple to use.
However, unlike Twitter, where I can easily interact with a large audience, my Mastodon network has only a few hundred followers. Suddenly, I had no idea what to post ea feeling that never bothers me on Twitter, perhaps because the network's size makes any post feel less significant. I quickly recovered, realizing that the smaller scale of Mastodon can be calming in comparison to Twitter's never-ending stream of stimulation.
A social media escape route
But I'm not quite ready to delete my Twitter account; Mastodon serves as a sort of social-media safety net in case Twitter becomes too much for me.
Roberts hasn't decided whether or not to close her Twitter account, but she was surprised by how quickly her Mastodon following grew. She has over 1,000 Mastodon followers in less than a week after signing up and informing her nearly 23,000 Twitter followers.
"People might not want to be caught on Twitter pretty soon," she predicted.
Starting over can be enjoyable in some ways.
"I wondered, 'What will it be like to start over?'" she said. "That's interesting; oh, that person is here!" "Here comes so-and-so!" I'm glad they're here so we can all be together.
