Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover has been a boon for Mastodon. The rival social media platform has added nearly 200,000 new users since Musk completed his acquisition of Twitter a week ago.
“199,430 is the number of new users across different Mastodon servers since October 27, along with 437 new servers,” Mastodon Founder Eugen Rochko reported on Wednesday night. “This bring(s) last day's total to 608,837 active users, which is without precedent the highest it's ever been for Mastodon and the fediverse."
The numbers represent an increase from about 250,000 monthly active users in mid-April when Mastodon noted an uptick in new users after Musk announced plans to buy Twitter.
Mastodon's current user count is still small compared to Twitter, which had 237.8 million monetizable daily active users as of July. Nevertheless, the influx of new activity to Mastodon shows some users are looking for alternatives to Twitter as Elon Musk prepares to make major changes to the platform, including charging $8 per month for the verified blue checkmark.
Mastodon functions like Twitter, allowing you to publish up to 500-character posts. But one key difference is how it operates as a decentralized social network through thousands of independent servers that each have their own rules. Hence, Mastodon has drawn comparisons to today’s email ecosystem, where you have numerous providers all communicating over standardized messaging protocols. Mastodon’s fediverse, made up of numerous independent servers, operates in a similar way.
The surge of new users to Mastodon has also caused some technical snafus. Rochko’s own server at Mastodon.Social experienced slowdowns earlier this week. But on Wednesday, he reported buying a more powerful server to help improve speeds.