The tumult at Twitter seems to have helped rival social media platform Mastodon reach over 1 million active users for the first time.
“Hey, so, we've hit 1,028,362 monthly active users across the network today,” Mastodon Founder Eugen Rochko reported on Monday, days after Twitter initiated mass layoffs.
The 1 million count also represents a significant increase from the 608,837 active users Rochko reported last Wednesday. This means that in a mere five days, Mastodon has enticed over 400,000 new and existing users to visit the platform.
In the same post, Rochko said the Mastodon ecosystem has doubled the number of independent servers on the network from 437 to 1,124 from last Wednesday.
Activity on Mastodon has been surging ever since Musk completed his takeover of Twitter on Oct. 27. Since then, Mastodon has attracted 489,003 new users, according to Rochko’s count. For perspective, back in mid-April when Musk announced his plan to buy Twitter, Mastodon only had around 250,000 monthly active users.
The numbers are still small compared to Twitter, which reported having 237.8 million monetizable daily active users back in July. But the growing interest in Mastodon could help turn the platform into a worthy competitor.
Unlike Twitter, Mastodon functions as a decentralized platform akin to email. The result means you can still circulate up to 500-character posts. But your posts are hosted over an independent server, which has its own rules on content moderation. Mastodon’s ecosystem is made up of hundreds of these independent servers, which can all communicate to share content.
In some cases, the surge of new users is causing technical problems. Rochko’s own Mastodon server suffered speed slowdowns last week, but he’s since upgraded the hardware.