fleeing twitter — Mastodon is hurtling toward a tipping point With rising popularity comes rising costs, culture shiftsand potential legal risks.
Amanda Hoover, wired.com – Dec 22, 2022 2:50 pm UTC EnlargeNurPhoto via getty reader comments 3 with 0 posters participating Share this story Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Share on Reddit
Rodti MacLeary started a Mastodon instance, mas.to, in 2019. By early November 2022, it had amassed around 35,000 users. But since Elon Musk bought Twitter and unleashed one chaotic decision after another, people have signed up for mas.to and other instances, or servers, in surging waves that have sometimes kicked them briefly offline. The influx of users is propelled by each haphazard policy update Musk professes from his own Twitter account. Last week, Twitters billionaire owner suspended several high-profile journalists and accused them of doxing him, and then briefly banned links to any social media competitors, including Mastodon. But the mas.to instance continued to grow, hitting 130,000 total users and 67,000 active users by Tuesday.
Thats minuscule compared to Twitters hundreds of millions of tweeters. But its a heavy lift for someone like MacLeary, who has a day job and no paid staff, and has funneled time and money into mas.to as a labor of love. As a decentralized, open-source social media platform, Mastodon is markedly different in its construction from Big Tech platforms like Meta, Twitter, and YouTube. Thats part of its appeal, and its working its way from a niche into the mainstream consciousness: Mastodon now has more than 9,000 instances and some nearly 2.5 million active monthly users. Advertisement
Theres definitely momentum behind it, MacLeary says. Whether that momentum has pushed it over the tipping point, I dont know. It reminds me of my experience in early Twitter, which was very positive. You felt like you knew everyone there.
Whether Mastodon stays a nice, utopian early Twitter or becomes a ubiquitous, messy social network is yet to be seen. But its growing in its potential to replicate some of what Twitter does, with politicians, celebrities, and journalists signing up. Twitter profiles now often bear Mastodon usernames, as social groups make the move to the other app. But theres a schism: Some new users want Mastodon to be Twitter, and some Mastodon users are there because theyre over Twitter.
And with that growing number of users comes more responsibilitynot just for Mastodon itself, but for volunteer administrators, whose hobbies running servers have become second jobs.
There are a lot of people who really dont realize what theyre getting themselves into, says Corey Silverstein, an attorney who specializes in Internet law. If youre running these [instances], you have to run it like youre the owner of Twitter. What people dont understand is how complicated it is to run a platform like this and how expensive it is. Page: 1 2 Next → reader comments 3 with 0 posters participating Share this story Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Share on Reddit Advertisement Channel Ars Technica ← Previous story Related Stories Today on Ars
