Berlin: Twitter has been in turmoil since taking control of the world’s richest man last week, with privacy-obsessed Germany’s decentralized, open alternative Mastodon seeing an influx of new users.
“The bird is free,” tweeted the Tesla mogul Elon Musk When he completed his $44 billion acquisition of Twitter. But many free-speech advocates reacted with dismay at the prospect of the world’s “town square” being controlled by one person and began to look for other options.
For the most part, Mastodon looks a lot like Twitter, with hashtags, political back-and-forth and tech jokes for the space with cat pictures.
But while Twitter and Facebook are controlled by one authority – a company – Mastodon is installed on thousands of computer servers, largely run by volunteer administrators who join their systems together in a federation.
People swap posts and links with others on their servers – or mastodon “instances” – and also, almost as easily, with users on other servers on a growing network.
The fruit of six years of work by a young German programmer, Eugen Rochko, Mastodon was born out of his desire to create a public sphere that was beyond the control of a single entity. That work is starting to pay off.
“We hit 1,028,362 monthly active users across the network today,” Rochko tweeted Monday – Mastodon’s version of the tweet. “It’s a lot of fun.”
It is still very small compared to its established rivals. Twitter reported 238 million daily active users who had viewed an ad as of the second quarter of 2022. Facebook said it had 1.98 billion daily active users as of the third quarter.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=/fkBnBZH_9Uo
But the surge in Mastodon users in just a few days is still shocking.
Ethan Zuckerman, a social media expert at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, wrote last week, “Over the past five years I have gained more new followers on Mastodon than I have in the past week.”
According to the widely cited Mastodon user account, before Musk completed the Twitter acquisition on October 27, Mastodon’s growth averaged 60–80 new users. It showed 3,568 new registrations in an hour on Monday morning.
Rochko started Mastodon in 2017, when rumors were rife that Peter Thiel, the founder of PayPal and an associate of Musk, was looking to buy Twitter.
“A right-wing billionaire was going to buy an actual public utility that isn’t public,” Rochko told Reuters earlier this year. “It’s really important to have this global communication platform where you can learn what’s happening in the world and chat with your friends. Why is it controlled by one company?”
totes and instances
There’s no shortage of other social networks ready to welcome any Twitter exodus, from ByteDance’s TikTok to Discord, a chat app that’s now far more popular than its native constituency of gamers.
Advocates of Mastodon say its decentralized approach makes it fundamentally different: instead of going to Twitter’s centrally-provided service, each user can choose their own provider, or even run their own Mastodon instance. Users can e-mail from Gmail or an employer-provided account or run their own e-mail server.
No company or individual can impose its will on the whole system or shut it down. If an extremist voice emerged with its own server, advocates say it would be easy enough for other servers to break ties with it, allowing it to talk to its shrinking band of followers and users.
The federated approach has drawbacks: It’s harder to follow people in the chaotic sprawl of Mastodon then on the neatly organized town square that centrally administered Twitter or Facebook might offer.
But a growing group of its supporters say they outweigh the advantages of its architecture.
Rochko, whose Mastodon Foundation runs on a crowded budget with modest grants from the European Commission, has found a particularly receptive audience among privacy-conscious European regulators.
Germany’s data protection commissioner is campaigning for government bodies to shut down their Facebook pages, saying there is no way to host a page there that is compliant with European privacy laws.
He says officials should follow the federal government’s own mastodon example. The European Commission also maintains a server for exiting EU bodies.
“No specific information should be sent to a legally questionable platform,” data commissioner Ulrich Kelber said earlier this year.
While Mastodon is busier than ever, it still has some big names in politics and showbiz that have made Twitter an addictive online home, especially for journalists. Few people know the comic Jan Boehmermann – Germany’s answer to John Oliver – outside his country, but more names are arriving daily.
For Rochko, the project’s only full-time employee, programming for a modest 2,400 euro ($2,394.96) monthly salary, continues at his home in a small town in East Germany.
“Would you believe me if I told you I was so tired?” He interrupted on Sunday.
($1 = 1.0021 Euro)
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