Mastodon is an open-source social media platform that has been live for over six years. However, its user interface is not very accessible and is a million miles away from the slick and easy-to-use experiences that we are used to thanks to the likes of Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Accordingly, Mastodon has never really gained much traction with a wide internet audience, that is until last week. When Elon Musk took over Twitter interest in Mastodon spiked and then when he took to laying off huge swathes of the Twitter workforce it spiked again. With Mastodon getting more attention than ever before, let’s take a look at the app.
Yesterday, Mastodon CEO Eugen Rochko, announced via a Mastodon post that “hit 1,028,362 monthly active users across the network today. 1,124 new Mastodon servers since Oct 27, and 489,003 new users.”
To put that into context, it was just last week when the Mastodon Twitter account was celebrating 655,000 active users as being the highest it has ever been. That sounds very exciting, and you may be thinking about moving over to Mastodon from Twitter yourself, but there are a few things you should know before you delete your Twitter account.
First off, Mastodon is not very easy to use and there is a considerable barrier to entry involved to getting yourself signed up and ready to go and then a learning curve to become proficient on the app. What sets Mastodon apart from the likes of Twitter and Facebook is that it is a decentralized social network. That means there isn’t one central team overseeing the whole network. Instead, the Mastodon team is responsible for the technological architecture, with people setting up their own servers or instances as they are known on Mastodon, which other users can join. These can be based around particular communities or appeal to certain types of people such as scientists.
Mastodon then is a free and open social network that allows users to essentially create their own mini-social networks using the Mastodon architecture. The fact that it is open source is likely one of the reasons it is the main Twitter alternative that is gaining traction in response to Musk’s takeover. Sure, Eugen Rochko is the founder and CEO of Mastodon but it simply isn’t possible for him to wield the type of power that Musk has been wielding over the past week or so. This offers a much more organic way of securing free speech as nobody is able to censor anybody really, but it is much easier for users to simply not listen to views they may find offensive or extreme. Servers can simply cut ties with extreme servers meaning the people there still get to say what they want to each other; it is just that nobody else will be forced to listen to them.
Another reason Mastodon is likely grabbing disillusioned Twitter users, however, relates to the functionality. Once you get past the complicated setup process and figure out which instance(s) you want to join and why the experience will start to feel a little like what you get on Twitter, it just won’t be as slick (look at the embedded toot above for an example of this). You will get a timeline that looks a bit like Twitter, which will serve up “toots” instead of tweets. Furthermore, as well as joining instances, you can also follow users outside of the instances you have joined, meaning you can assemble a feed in a similar way to how you do it on Twitter.
There is no getting away from the fact, however, that at the moment, Mastodon is more difficult to use than Twitter and offers new users plenty of chances to give up and walk away while they are trying to set up their account. You need to search for a server to join but can’t type in the name you are looking for. For many of the servers, you have to apply to join rather than simply being able to create your account. This will put a lot of users off.
If this sounds like a problem for you, don’t worry, we have got you covered as we are working on a full guide that will get you set up on Mastodon and, accustomed to how to use it, and also able to find, join, and even set up your own servers at will. We will get that published as soon as we can.
So, what does all this mean then? Is Mastodon going to keep stealing users from Twitter? Well, most likely yes and no. It looks like Twitter is currently going through a major transformation and what we are seeing with the increased numbers of users on Mastodon is a rising discomfort among certain aspects of the Twitter userbase in the direction that transformation is taking. We have already covered the security issues some of Elon Musk’s changes are causing but there are also issues relating to the users he is allowing back onto the app at the same time as he is permanently banning others for impersonating him.
Ironically, what this all means is that while Musk thought he was buying the digital town square in a bid to preserve free speech, his polarizing actions so far are fueling a split among the Twitter user base, with more users than ever before turning to Mastodon, meaning there may not be a single town square thanks to his actions.
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