If you joined social-networking provider Mastodon today because of the Elon Musk-Twitter news, you're not alone.
On Monday morning, one of the main servers for Mastodon saw a flood of user traffic, which caused its speeds to slow. Specifically, the traffic surge hit the mastodon.social server, which is perhaps the most popular "instance" on the decentralized social network.
“Mastodon.social is being slow right now, as far as I can tell because there's twice as many people using it at the same time as ever have,” wrote Founder Eugen Rochko.
The traffic surge was significant enough that Rochko decided to temporarily delist mastodon.social from the list of communities new users can join upon sign-up.
In the same post, Rochko added: “I'm working on making it go fast again, but in the meantime, do remember to invite people to joinmastodon.org instead of directly to mastodon.social. People don't have to be on the same server to follow you.”
Mastodon has been seeing an increase in new users ever since Musk bought a stake in Twitter earlier this month. The social network functions a lot like Twitter in terms of microblogging features. But on the infrastructure side, one big difference is Mastodon’s decentralized nature. The social network is made up of numerous independent servers, which operate using their own rules, but can still interact with each other through a federated platform. As a result, Mastodon's social-networking model has been compared to how email operates through various providers, such as Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo Mail.
By Monday mid-day, Rochko said he had resolved the speed issue with the mastodon.social server. “I'm stressed out. I just want to play Dota. But I realize this is a kind of ‘do or die’ moment,” he added, alluding to the surge in user interest.
Still, Mastodon has a long way to go before it can reach the scale of Twitter. The mastodon.social server itself only has about 662,000 users while the entire federated platform is estimated to have over 3.5 million. In comparison, Twitter has 217 million daily active users.
If you're interested in trying Mastodon, check out our guide on how to get started.