Mastodon, Decentralized Application Flooded With Users After Twitter Acquired By Elon Musk

Mastodon, a social media application from Germany, has been flooded with users. (photo: doc. mastodon)

JAKARTA – While Twitter has been in disarray since the world's richest man, Elon Musk, acquired it last week, Mastodon, a decentralized, privacy-obsessed alternative platform from Germany, has been inundated with new users.

"Birds are free," tweeted Tesla mogul Elon Musk as he completed his 44 billion Twitter acquisition. But many free speech advocates reacted with dismay to the prospect of a world "town square" controlled by one person and began to look for other options.

Broadly speaking, Mastodon does look like Twitter, with hashtags, back-and-forth politics, and tech banter jockeying for space with images of cats.

While Twitter and Facebook are controlled by one authority, a company, Mastodon is installed on thousands of computer servers. In fact, most are run by voluntary administrators who combine their systems together in a federation.

People exchange posts and links with others on their own servers or Mastodon "instances," and also, easily, with users on other servers across a growing network.

The fruit of six years of hard work by Eugen Rochko, a young programmer from Germany, Mastodon was born out of his desire to create a public sphere that is beyond the control of a single entity. That work is now starting to pay off.

"We have reached 1,028,362 monthly active users across the network today," said Rochko – in the Mastodon version of the tweet, on Monday, November 7th. "That's pretty cool."

However, this platform is still relatively small compared to its established rivals. Twitter reported 238 million daily active users who had seen ads in the second quarter of 2022. Facebook said it had 1.98 billion daily active users in the third quarter.

But the surge in Mastodon users in a matter of days was surprising.

"I gained more new followers on Mastodon in the past week than I had in the previous five years," wrote Ethan Zuckerman, a social media expert at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, last week.

Before Musk completed his Twitter acquisition on October 27, Mastodon's growth averaged 60-80 new users per hour, according to the widely cited Mastodon User account. That shows 3,568 new signups in an hour on Monday morning, November 7.

Rochko started Mastodon in 2017, when rumors spread that PayPal founder and Musk ally, Peter Thiel, wanted to buy Twitter.

"A right-wing billionaire would buy a de facto public utility that is not public," Rochko told Reuters earlier this year. "It's very important to have a 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?"

Toot Mastodon

Mastodon proponents say the decentralized approach makes it fundamentally different: instead of going to the centralized service that Twitter provides, each user can choose their own provider, or even run their own instance of Mastodon, just as users can send email from Gmail or company from the provided account or run their own email server.

No single company or person, can impose their will on the entire system or shut it all down. If extremist voices emerge with their own servers, proponents say, it will be easy enough for other servers to cut ties with it, then let it speak to a shrinking group of followers and users.

The federation approach has the downside of finding people to follow in the anarchic chaos of Mastodon than it is in the well-organized town squares that centrally managed Twitter or Facebook can offer.

But its growing support group says it's worth the architectural prominence.

Rochko, whose Mastodon foundation runs on a meager crowdfunded budget coupled with a modest grant from the European Commission, has found a very receptive audience among privacy-conscious European regulators.

Germany's data protection commissioner is running a campaign to get government agencies to shut down their Facebook pages, because, he said, there is no way to host pages there that comply with European privacy laws.

"Authorities should move to the federal government's Mastodon instance," he said. The European Commission also maintains servers for EU agencies.

"No proprietary information should be transmitted via a legally questionable platform," data commissioner Ulrich Kelber said earlier this year.

Even though Mastodon is busier than ever, it still has some of the big names from politics and showbiz that have made Twitter an addictive online home for journalists in particular. Few know the Jan Boehmermann comic, Germany's answer to John Oliver, outside of his country, but more names are arriving every day.

For Rochko, the project's only full-time employee, programs at his home in a small town in eastern Germany with a monthly salary of 2,400 euros (IDR 37.5 million).

"Would you believe me if I told you that I was very tired?" he said on Sunday.