Elon Musk finally completed the Twitter deal on Friday and is now officially the owner and CEO of the social media platform. The billionaire’s era on Twitter started with a controversy. Musk first fired all of the company’s top executives. Then, he ordered the implementation of new Blue subscription policies, requiring all verified accounts to pay $20 per month. While Musk still needs to refine Twitter’s content policies, the platform is now hit by a coordinated trolling campaign.
Mastodon is the new home of Twitter’s dissatisfied users
But the question is what Mastodon is and why it has become popular among Twitter users. According to the company’s about us page, Mastodon was first launched in 2016 as a non-profit organization located in Germany. It is an open-source microblogging service that allows users to share posts of up to 500 characters. The posts on Mastodon are called ‘toots,’ and users can like, reshare, and comment on them. Eugen Rochko is currently the CEO of Mastodon and claims to be dissatisfied with the state and direction of Twitter. Rochko already said that 18,000 users signed up for Mastodon in the week leading up to the Twitter sale (via TechCrunch). The company also claims to have 529K monthly active users, and its app is available for the web and mobile. But what sets Mastodon apart from Twitter is its decentralized nature. Unlike Twitter, Mastodon is a decentralized social media platform that has allowed users to sign up on individual servers like a county or city-specific servers. Users can also opt for interests-based servers like LGBTQ+-friendly ones. Currently, the most popular server is Mastodon.social, which hosts 817,219 users. A Japanese server, pawoo.net, is the next with 766,399 users. Of course, users have no limitations for interacting with people from other servers. Yet, novice platforms like Mastodon or Parler are not comparable with Twitter regarding daily active users, financial exchanges, and employment numbers. But they’ll definitely see a surge in their user base as many Twitter users aren’t satisfied with Elon Musk’s strategies for the platform’s future. As Musk continues to reshape Twitter, we may see more new social platforms, like Bluesky from Jack Dorsey, coming to life and aim to hunt Twitter’s unhappy users.
