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Mastodon Gained 70,000 Users After Musk's Twitter Takeover (theguardian.com) 154

Posted by BeauHD from the cause-and-effect dept.
"More than 70,000 users joined Mastodon on the day after Musk's Twitter takeover announcement," writes Slashdot reader votsalo. "Mastodon is a six-year-old decentralized social media platform that uses 'federated' servers." The Guardian's Wilfred Chan writes: I joined Mastodon this week, and it took a few hours just to master its new vocabulary. Some of it is a little silly-sounding: instead of tweets, you have "toots". Things get trickier after that. Mastodon is not a single website but a network of thousands of websites called "instances", also called servers. These servers are "federated", which means they are run by different entities but can still communicate with each other without needing to go through a central system. And the space they all exist in is called the "fediverse," which some savvy tooters call "the Fedi."

When you sign up for Mastodon, the first thing you do is choose a server. There are general-purpose ones, such as mastodon.social, as well as ones aimed at interest groups, such as kpop.social or linuxrocks.online. There are also joke servers like dolphin.town, where the only thing users are allowed to post is the letter "e". The server becomes part of your username (for example, wilfred@kpop.social), and the toots you see on your feed are toots from your server-mates, rather than from the entire fediverse. But you're also free to toot at people from other servers and even "boost" their public toots on to your feed.

That's how Mastodon creates a unified global experience without being controlled by one entity, said Eugen Rochko, Mastodon's Germany-based founder and lead developer. "The servers are service providers, like Hotmail and Gmail are for email. It doesn't mean that the different servers are isolated from each other, like old school forums," he said. "Having just one account allows you to follow and interact with anyone in this global decentralized social network." But Mastodon's model comes with its own risks. If the server you join disappears, you could lose everything, just like if your email provider shut down. A Mastodon server admin also has ultimate control over everything you do: if for some reason the owner of kpop.social doesn't like that I boosted a toot from dolphin.town, they could remove it or even "defederate" the server, which would block all dolphin toots from the k-pop server completely. A server admin could also snoop on my private toots if they wanted to -- or delete my account for any reason. While Mastadon's 70,000 jump in users sounds impressive, it's "still a drop in a bucket compared with Twitter's reported 450 million daily active users," says Chan. The decentralized software also remains difficult for many people to use.

According to TechCrunch, Mastadon says it has "gained 123,562 new users as of October 27, 2022 and now has 528,607 active users on the network as of October 31, 2022."
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Mastodon Gained 70,000 Users After Musk's Twitter Takeover More

Mastodon Gained 70,000 Users After Musk's Twitter Takeover

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  • And... how many of them are bots? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by franzrogar ( 3986783 ) on Wednesday November 02, 2022 @07:27PM (#63020515)

    I mean, I'm quite sure that more than 70,000 bots were kicked out of Twitter... ...so what percentage of them went to that other platform?

    • Re: And... how many of them are bots? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by saloomy ( 2817221 ) on Wednesday November 02, 2022 @07:39PM (#63020533)
      Probably most of them. Besides. If you are leaving Twitter because you are not a fan of Musk, you likely are not a fan of Mastadon either.

      • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

        by Tailhook ( 98486 )

        you likely are not a fan of Mastadon either.

        Wait till all the Twitter refugees find out that Mastodon servers aren't necessarily moderated by the gender confused.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by jvkjvk ( 102057 )

        >If you are leaving Twitter because you are not a fan of Musk, you likely are not a fan of Mastadon either.

        Why? Federated servers instead of one company algorithm telling you what to see? Or do you think it's the Musk freeze peach thing? Just curious, because I am not a fan of Musk, but am a fan of Mastadon.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gx5000 ( 863863 )
      My first though as well...
      It's all show business no?

    • Very funny. Bots wouldn't go away. Mastodon's user base is far too small for bots. Hard to imagine that the users who left were of any value to Twitter in the first place.

      • Left is also a strong word. Created an account would be more accurate. The real question is what's the continued engagement going to be on those accounts. Lucky to be higher than 10% honestly.

    • Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Wednesday November 02, 2022 @09:34PM (#63020779)
      Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Virtually none of them, I would wager. I have had an account for a few years, and the density still ins't there to make it worthwhile for spam bots. You might want to make a bit for other reasons, but there's not much ROI on Mastodon.

      And if your server starts showing particularly spammy behaviour, other servers in the federation can simply refuse to federate with you, if I remember right. Blocking is trivial.

    • Don't be daft. People don't trust Musk, esp when pulling bullshit like the verified badge cost, so it looks like it's becoming a very volatile. Nobody says that people that joined Mastodon have LEFT Twitter, they just have a backup plan.

      • Hardly anyone with a verified badge cares about an $8 charge. Musk is probably correct that âoeinfluencersâ need Twitter more than Twitter needs them, at least in the short term. If influencers collectively refused to pay the fee, that might change the math, but I donâ(TM)t see that happening. More likely Twitter will just devolve into an unmoderated cess pool and fade into irrelevance.

        • Twitter, as everything, will fade into irrelevance, after half a generation at most. Young people don't use Twitter much, so time is ticking. Musk seems to be the catalyst for this fade-into-the-void though. The verified people surely don't mind shelling out 8$/mo, but the rest look at the situation, and its instability, and see the writing on the wall for the platform ... and that's why they look for backup spaces, like Mastodon. Nobody's fleeing yet, just looking for exit routes.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Nugoo ( 1794744 )
      Why would bots migrate to a new platform after getting kicked off an old one? Does a bunch of Twitter bots getting banned somehow make Mastodon bots more valuable? If it's worth running all those bots on Mastodon, surely they'd have already been running before Musk bought Twitter.

  • Glad to see alternatives (Score:3)

    by stabiesoft ( 733417 ) on Wednesday November 02, 2022 @07:33PM (#63020521) Homepage
    I hope twitter just implodes massively.

    • You might just get your wishes come true.

      According to Bloomberg, Musk is planning to fire 50% of Twitter's workforce [twitter.com], starting next Friday (4/11). There's also multiple reports of big advertisers, like L'Oreal, suspending all ad spending in the platform.

      • Twitter already wasn't selling enough ads to pay their own bills. By revenue, they have a little under 3% of the market. Impressions aren't worth a lot when they're being shown to an army of fucking shitposting dumbfucks.
        Firing half its workforce might be what it takes to get its books in the black, but I doubt it.

        That company was always a sinking ship.
  • Microblogging is not mandatory.

    We will see if it survives.

    TikTok on on the edge as well. Facebook is being propped up by those who desperately need to fell relevant. It is sad.

    Twitter is nice because it is millions of different people with different ideas and belief. Who Ishtar accidentally be exposed to each other and while the rough edges definite gets sanded down, there is still a bunch of diversity.

    While the rest these are just a few thousand people talking about the myths that hold their group

  • You can't even buy an ice cream cone with out some jerk off telling you that libtards or magats own the company. SO DUMB.

    • Jerks have always existed. The difference is they now have megaphones and reach everyone.

  • The federated network concept is a great idea in terms of limiting the amount of damage a company can do, whether through censorship, advertising abuse, leaking personal info, or any number of other abuses. It does, however, also make governance challenging.

    For example, if a server federates with yours, that also means you their users can post spam, or commit other abuse on your server. You can ban the user from your server, but if they control the server, they could arbitrarily create new users and continue abusing. And if you end up banning a server, they could just create another server. So at some point, I would expect the trust model to devolve to the point where each server has to explicitly opt in to federating with any other server, and then you're basically back to the current model of a bunch of individual bulletin boards plus one or two big ones that have all of the actual users.

    I'm not really sure how to solve that problem without either some sort of globally verifiable real identity provider or at least an authentication token from some global provider that costs enough money to discourage people from just dumping accounts whenever one gets banned.

    There's also the question of what prevents someone like Cambridge Analytica from abusing the trust inherent in a federated system to systematically clone the entire universe of public data and do mass analytics on it.

    So although the concept seems cool in theory, it also feels like one of those ideas that's great until you scale it up to millions of users, at which point people come out of the woodwork to abuse it and cause chaos. But we'll see. :-)

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward

      For example, if a server federates with yours, that also means you their users can post spam, or commit other abuse on your server. You can ban the user from your server, but if they control the server, they could arbitrarily create new users and continue abusing. And if you end up banning a server, they could just create another server. So at some point, I would expect the trust model to devolve to the point where each server has to explicitly opt in to federating with any other server, and then you're basically back to the current model of a bunch of individual bulletin boards plus one or two big ones that have all of the actual users.

      Server operators have to request federation links from other servers.
      You can't create a server and magically have permission to link anywhere. Let alone recreate one and do the same.

      Linking to the main hub is a process only performed periodically, and at the time your server has to have been running for some time already.

      If a spammer server finds a link through some other server, they will be asked to unlink from it or risk being unlinked themselves.
      If a server operator repeatedly links in new spam servers

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Verification is an issue too. You have to rely on every server you federate with properly vetting users, otherwise you can expect dozens of fake accounts for anyone remotely famous. Imagine how much worse it would have been if there had been multiple fake Donald Trump accounts, for example.

  • Mastodon? I've seen them play live before. Does that make me a 'user'?

  • 70,000 out of 165,000,000 (reported 330,000,000 divided by 2 to assume 50% of accounts are bots or dormant, like mine) is at most 0.04% of Twitter's active user base. If the trend continues for another month, the loss of 1.2% of its active user base might make Musk interrupt his daily spewing of nonsense to take note.

    Otherwise, this is not a story.

    • I think you're getting duped by the spin of the headline. I see nothing to indicate that Mastadon's 70,000 gain came at the cost of Twitter. As far as I know there's no law against having accounts on both.

  • Snooping on Mastodon (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Khyber ( 864651 ) <techkitsune@gmail.com> on Wednesday November 02, 2022 @08:02PM (#63020595) Homepage Journal

    "A server admin could also snoop on my private toots if they wanted to"

    This is exactly why I don't use Mastodon. I know all too well that people with power abuse the fuck out of it. At least with a company, I have SOME chance of being able to sue and gain recompense. some random Mastodon server admin? Pfft.

    Mastodon has a serious security and accountability problem, and should be avoided until they figure that part out.

  • Twitter has over 200 million users. This is a rounding error, and probably just a bunch of spammers or FUDsters looking for greener pastures.

  • Don't dare be un-woke on Mastodon or they'll cancel you faster than Twitter ever would. Especially mastodon.social

  • Anyway most of twitter is filled with bots. Even I have followers, Imagine that!

    So real life a few million, 8$ month likely to be real users and people willing to invest to create enough profiles to amplify their messages. Simple filter tools will come ion and unpaid user posting will be filtered out for most people. Money is speech, more money is louder speech. Lets see how it turns out.

  • Supposedly, Musk has 108 million followers. Supposedly, Twitter has as previous poster said over 200 Million users. I have also read Twitter base is 450M, 300M. They don't know how many users they have? Nobody seems to know how many actual Daily Active Users there are. As an information technology company, I find it hard to believe they have so little grip on internal metrics. So Musk apparently has over half of the base as followers. He also put, according to AlJazeera article above, 28 Billion Real Americ

  • The worst of social media (Score:3)

    by argStyopa ( 232550 ) on Wednesday November 02, 2022 @10:30PM (#63020837) Journal

    The ability to surround oneself with people that agree with you is the worst facet of social media's many ills.

    Imagine where the US would be today if the people in power in the 1950s-1960s were able to simply 'tune-out' people of color, antiwar activists, homosexuals.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by k2r ( 255754 )

      > The ability to surround oneself with people that agree with you is the worst facet of social media's many ills.

      I do not see why surrounding myself with people who celebrate hitting the husband of a politician with a hammer would be a good thing.
      All of us who are still using Twitter to post content are validating this.

  • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Is Mastodon distributed like email is? If so why does it need moderation? Is email moderated? Can you bring your own domain to a mastodon server, and then move your account to another server without changing your mastodon address?
    • email is moderated via spam filters and spam registries. I think that's about it.
    • I suppose moderation is needed to determine how much publicity to give to someone's posts. If I write posts that only my followers can read, then why moderate my posts at all? The people who decided to follow me can decide to unfollow me. Nobody else will see my posts. Do search engines do moderation? It seems that moderation is needed when posts are pushed into other people's ears through algorithms.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by k2r ( 255754 )

      > Is email moderated?

      I share my mail server with some of my friends. I guarantee you that I would kick out everybody who celebrates the attack on Pelosis husband.
      Is this moderation in your eyes?

  • Musk, like other billionaires, isn't in the business of begging for your support. People are on Twitter because they want the attention. They're not switching to Mastodon, because that would defeat the purpose. Don't be ridiculous. 70000 is a rounding error.

  • Yeah, that would be just awful if huge privately owned social media companies had an effect on the nation's ... oh wait.

  • instead of tweets, you have "toots".

    That made up my mind about Mastodon pretty quickly.

  • It won't be long before they run into issues on Mastodon. Like Will Wheaton, they may find themselves in a struggle session for offending leftist identitarians more extreme than themselves. That and they'll likely find a massive drop in attention due to the far smaller user base.

    They'll be back on Twitter. The Musk panic will die down. They'll frame their return as a brave act of defiance.

  • and "tweets" are not silly sounding? (Score:3, Funny)

    by ruddk ( 5153113 ) on Thursday November 03, 2022 @10:22AM (#63021661)

    " Some of it is a little silly-sounding: instead of tweets, you have "toots". Things get trickier after that."
    Unlike tweets.
    And if that is your level of unpreparedness for change then Lord have mercy. :D

  • If you liked Twitter because it offered you a cultural bubble ("safe space" as these are called today), how does moving to a decentralized system help? Inevitably you are going to run into people you disagree with.

    • Here are some key Mastodon features that should excite everyone's inner pinko. (from the summary)

      - A Mastodon server admin has ultimate control over everything you do.
      - If an admin doesn't like something you did, they could remove it.
      - An admin can "defederate" a server, this would block all toots from the defederated server completely.
      - A server admin could snoop on your private toots.
      - A server admin could delete your account for any reason.
      - If the server

      • If these features work as intended, then Mastodon should be exactly what the alt-left wants! A sealed-off universe of their own.

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