After tycoon and businessman Elon Musk bought Twitter, other social networks began to gain space in the digital market. This is the case with Mastodon, German platform that gained thousands of new fans this past week. The federative social network registered the brand of more than 1 million active users this Monday, 7 of November of 2022.
Precisely, are already 1.028.362 accounts registered with Mastodon, which appears as an alternative for followers of Twitter and its old processes. With the mass layoffs and the changes applied by Musk, the jump in new users on Mastodon in the last few days has been quite significant.
According to social media expert at the University of Massachusetts, Ethan Zuckerman, this is record growth. “More followers joined Mastodon in the last week than in the previous five years”, guarantees the specialist.
How Mastodon works?
Mastodon was created by German programmer Eugen Rochko in 2016 and emerges as an alternative network to Twitter. This is a social network that is part of the so-called “Fediverso”, a decentralized network interconnected with independently operated servers.
I.e, Mastodon is not managed by a company like its competitor Twitter and Facebook itself. Network control is done by thousands of servers and, mostly, by volunteer administrators who unify the system within the federation.
Even with its peculiarities, Mastodon works similarly to Twitter. Famous hashtags are also a big feature of posts on this social network, just as internet users can share their thoughts and find shares of political topics, entertainment and even memes.
Mastodon fans argue that the experience on the social network is different precisely because of its decentralized approach. No Mastodon, each user chooses their own provider and can even run their own instance of the social network.
The competing numbers
Despite the growth, Mastodon still has a long way to go when compared to its most direct competitors. In the end, Today Twitter has 238 millions of active users, while Facebook has 1,98 billion.
Furthermore, currently the disadvantage of Mastodon is precisely its decentralized way of operating. One of the platform's main difficulties is that users are able to locate other people they are interested in following on the social network..
