Berlin, Germany

Since the Tesla CEO Elon Musk took over the microblogging platform, people have jumped ship. Twitter users have turned to other social media platforms and seemingly one of the most popular ones, Mastodon, has emerged as the winner. Mastodon has been dubbed as an open-source, decentralised, or federated social network which allows users to construct their own networks or 'instances', this effectively gives them access and ownership of their data. The ad-free social media platform has also recently garnered some 2.5 million users. 

Advertisment

“Mastodon has recently exploded in popularity, jumping from approx. 300K monthly active users to 2.5 million between the months of October and November, with more and more journalists, political figures, writers, actors and organisations moving over,” said the Mastodon founder Eugen Rochko on Tuesday. Notably, this amounts to more than 800 per cent of growth seen in recent months, the statement added. 

ALSO READ | Mastodon: How does the alternative to Twitter work?

The success has consequently triggered “a land-grab for space on it from groups including browser makers, cryptocurrency advocates and other social networks”, said a report by the Guardian. 

Advertisment

Meanwhile, the browser maker of Firefox, Mozilla, said that it would start a Mastodon 'instance’, with the intention to contribute to the “healthy and sustainable growth of a federated social space that doesn’t just operate but thrives on its own terms, independent of profit- and control-motivated tech firms,” said Steve Teixeira, the chief product officer at Mozilla, as quoted by the Guardian. 

Mozilla, which is also owned by a non-profit foundation, said that we are living through the consequences of two decades of â€œcentralised, corporate-controlled social media, with a small oligopoly of large tech firms tightening their grip on the public square.” He added, “In private hands, our choice is limited, toxicity is rewarded, rage is called engagement, public trust is corroded, and basic human decency is often an afterthought.” 

ALSO READ | Twitter users jump ship to Mastodon and Koo. What are these social media platforms?

Advertisment

Meanwhile, Tumblr which was previously owned by Yahoo! and Verizon and was later sold to WordPress developers Automattic also witnessed a surge in the number of users and said that it will look into adding “interoperability and ActivityPub support as soon as possible.” 

This is in reference to Mastodon, which also uses ActivityPub, enabling it to be compatible with a wide array of communities and allowing users to use photo sharing, podcasting and social networking all share content with each other.

This comes as the Twitterverse gets more and more chaotic, users have started posting links to other social media platforms in their posts which include outside platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Mastodon, Post and Truth Social, as well as third-party social media link aggregators such as linktr.ee and ink.bio. 

ALSO READ | Twitter to now ban users from posting links to rival platforms

This led Musk to briefly ban all links to other social media platforms and reportedly suspended user accounts who wrote their Mastodon usernames on Twitter. However, Musk in a recent interview admitted that the move was a bad idea. 

(With inputs from agencies) 

WATCH WION LIVE HERE

You can now write for wionews.com and be a part of the community. Share your stories and opinions with us here.