A few days after tycoon Elon Musk took the reins of the social network Twitter, and given the controversial decisions he has made during this time, hundreds of thousands of users decided to migrate to Mastodon.
Mastodon is a decentralized and open source platform created in 2016. In 2018 it became notorious after sheltering a first wave of Twitter migrants, mostly bitcoiners.
A BBC report indicates that Mastodon, created more than five years ago, already has 655,000 users. This figure was reached after more than 230,000 users were added in the last week, who have reportedly left Twitter.
Ryan Wild, who runs one of Mastodon’s servers in the UK, declared that in just 24 hours he received more than 6,000 new members. A situation that forced him to pause registration momentarily.
Mastodon is a decentralized social network that allows any user to run a server. Each server has its own rules, allowing users to choose servers that they believe conform to policies they agree with.
At the time of opening an account, the new user can decide which server to register on. They are available in various locations around the world and according to different themes, such as technology, sports or entertainment. This avoids the centralization common to platforms such as Twitter, where users tend to congregate on a single website.
In general, the social network functions similarly to Twitter. It is possible to send messages, called “toots,” of up to 500 characters and navigate between topics with the search enabled by the platform.
Mastodon was the fate of part of the Twitter bitcoin community that, at the time, was affected by cryptocurrency-related scam bots. Also, by censorship actions against some users.
Only in August of that year, a large number of people linked to the Bitcoin ecosystem moved from Twitter to Mastodon. At that time Twitter was shutting down developer accounts and there was a content purge executed by the network controllers.
Four years after this event, the new wave of Twitter migrants to this decentralized social network has its origins in Musk’s management. The billionaire is now the owner of the platform and has allowed himself to lay off much of the staff and plans to impose a fee of USD 8 per month to those who want to have the blue authentication badge on their profile.
