Since Oct. 27th, when Elon Musk took control of Twitter, people started jumping ship, or at least looking around for other places to jump ship to, since there is no other place that is really like twitter out there on the net landscape – well, except for one, and that is a service called Mastodon.
Mastodon has been around since 2016 and has a lot of the same things the twitter does,they have a 500 character limit on posts and you can also post pictures and video as well as follow people and reblog their posts. It would seem that a lot of people don’t want to be under Elon Musk’s thumb on their social media, especially after what has transpired since his takeover.
Will Twitter lose ground to Mastodon?
Use of racial slurs on the app went up by 500%, making those that weren’t blatantly racist feel very uncomfortable. Then he proceeded to fire 4,000 employees via email memes. Yes, that’s right, email memes. Did he think that this was Tumblr back in 2009 or something?
Because that’s what that energy is giving. Mastodon is completely different from Twitter in the way that it’s set up, instead of a comic book villain type mastermind behind the whole thing it’s a platform that is supported by crowdfunding and it’s run by individuals who, it would seem for the moment, can’t be bought.
Meaning, they’re not advertising verification for $8 and the platform is free to post on and is also ad free. A lot of users are worried about how the content moderation of twitter might change, because ‘free speech’ never meant freedom from consequences of that speech, but that’s exactly the direction that a lot of people are fearing that Musk is going to take the company in and there are hundreds, if not thousands, of people who don’t want any part of it.
As of right now, Mastodon boasts about 230,000 users which is the biggest its ever been, but with the Twitter takeover it’s bound to get bigger. Stay tuned!!!