A small social network that few people had heard of two months ago is one of the biggest beneficiaries of billionaire Elon Musk‘s chaotic ownership of Twitter.
Mastodon, an alternative microblogging platform, has seen a surge in user sign-ups since Musk, the world’s second-richest man, purchased Twitter in late October. According to hourly data from a Mastodon user counter, the surges typically occurred shortly after some of Musk’s most newsworthy actions.
From October 1 to October 26, Mastodon-powered sites averaged about 130 new sign-ups per hour. After Musk took control of Twitter on Oct. 28, the number increased to 2,000 per hour. Sign-ups increased to more than 5,000 per hour after Twitter began mass layoffs a week later, and they peaked at nearly 10,000 per hour after employees resigned en masse in response to an email ultimatum on Nov. 17.
In mid-December, when Twitter suspended journalists who had been reporting on Musk and the company, and again when Twitter abruptly banned users from sharing links to their profiles on other major social networks, new sign-ups increased.
Mastodon accounts have been created by journalists, news organizations, authors, and politicians since Musk’s takeover of Twitter. Mastodon, on the other hand, is open-source and built on a model of hundreds of small sites that communicate with one another rather than one large site.
As of Wednesday, there were approximately 8.7 million users across Mastodon-powered sites tracked by instance tracker Instances. social. Twitter is 29 times larger, with 237 million users in the second quarter of 2022. Facebook is more than 300 times larger, with 2.9 billion users in the third quarter of 2022.
