Mastodon: About 2.5 million users joined Mastodon since Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover |

Twitter alternative Mastodon has seen an influx of users since Elon Musk took over the ‘Bird company’ in late October. As per Eugen Rochko, who is the CEO, founder, and lead developer of the open social media platform from Germany, Mastodon saw its user base spiral up from about 3,00,000 monthly active users to 2.5 million between October and November this year.
“While there is no shortage of social media platforms new and old, this [Mastodon] is a radically different approach to social media that offers something traditional social media cannot,” Rochko said in a blog post. He also mentioned that “more and more journalists, political figures, writers, actors and organisations” are moving over to Mastodon.
Mastodon CEO attacks Twitter over accounts suspensions
The CEO also attacked Twitter and Musk for suspending Mastodon’s handle after it shared a link to the newly-registered Mastodon account of @ElonJet, an account that broadcasts public flight path data of Elon Musk’s private jet. Twitter suspended @ElonJet on the platform.
“This is a stark reminder that centralised platforms can impose arbitrary and unfair limits on what you can and can’t say while holding your social graph hostage,” he said.

Twitter also suspended the accounts of multiple journalists from major publications such as CNN, The New York Times, and The Washington Post, as well as some independent journalists for either linking to the account itself or talking about the event. When some of the journalists tried to tweet links to any Mastodon servers, they were greeted with a message saying that links were identified as “potentially harmful.”
“Understanding that freedom of the press is absolutely essential for a functional democracy, we are excited to see Mastodon grow and become a household name in newsrooms across the world, and we are committed to continuing to improve our software to face up to new challenges that come with rapid growth and increasing demand,” the CEO said in the blog post.
Twitter, on Sunday (December 18), said that it would not allow users to promote their presence on other social platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, Mastodon, Truth Social, and others. However, Musk later apologised for the policy change.

How is Mastodon different from Twitter?
Mastodon may look a lot like Twitter because account holders can write posts (called “toots”), reply to, like and repost others’ toots as well as follow each other but is an open social media platform.
It is a collection of different, independently run and self-funded servers and no one, even CEO Rochko, doesn’t have the power to force any server to comply with any standards.
“At Mastodon, we believe that there doesn’t have to be a middleman between you and your audience and that journalists and government institutions especially should not have to rely on a private platform to reach the public. Our free and open-source software enables anyone to run a social media platform entirely on their own infrastructure, entirely under their own control, while connecting to a global decentralized social network,” Rochko said.
These servers have different rules, sometimes stricter than those at Twitter. If there is hate speech on one server, other servers can jointly block that server.
“Not only does this allow organisations like the German government or the European Commission to run their own Mastodon servers where they publish important information that gets distributed to thousands of their followers across many different Mastodon servers, but it also gives you the freedom to choose a social media provider the same way you would choose a telephone, internet, or e-mail provider, and to move from one to the other while retaining your followers,” the CEO said in the post.
Since it is a free platform, people can promote their businesses and there are no ads on Mastodon. However, some servers may ask for donations.