Mastodon, a social media platform decentralized by Mastodon, is being used as an alternative to Twitter. Mastodon’s user base grew from 300,000 monthly active users in October to 2.5 million in November, Eugen Rochko, Mastodon CEO, said in a blog post.
Elon Musk officially took over Twitter in late October. Mastodon’s huge jump in users almost directly followed Musk’s new ownership. Rochko also addressed Twitter’s recently reversed bans on Twitter sharing links to Mastodon.
This was in response to many journalists and the joinmastodon accounts created following the ban on ElonJet. Rochko stated, “This is a stark reminder that centralized platforms can impose arbitrary and unfair limits on what you can and can’t say while holding your social graph hostage,”
“At Mastodon, we believe that there doesn’t have to be a middleman between you and your audience and that journalists and government institutions especially should not have to rely on a private platform to reach the public.”
Mastodon is one of many Twitter alternatives that people are using. Post, led by Noam Bardin, former CEO of Waze, Hive, recently relaunched following security issues and other familiar social platforms such as Discord, Tumblr, and Reddit. The bird app continues to thrive despite growing interest in it.
Musk’s poll asking whether he should resign as CEO of Twitter had more than a 17.5 million people vote. (The majority of people voted for him to quit. Musk also repeatedly claimed that the site’s use is at an all-time high.
Rochko, however, sounds optimistic about Mastodon’s prospects. “Understanding that freedom of the press is absolutely essential for a functional democracy, we are excited to see Mastodon grow and become a household name in newsrooms across the world, and we are committed to continuing to improve our software to face up to new challenges that come with rapid growth and increasing demand,” he wrote.
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