For the past few months, Twitter has been serving all kinds of drama which has led to the erection of rumor mills churning all sorts of scenarios around the social media platform that has the backdrop of a company dealing with a massive drop in revenue, following the takeover, adding to a heavy debt burden while possibly trying to overcome it by introducing monthly Twitter subscription fee.
In the wake of the significant changes that have come and are still coming, a massive number of people are leaving Twitter. With the loss of over a million users since Musk"s takeover, many are suggesting its imminent end. Now, Mastodon, free and open-source software for running self-hosted social networking services and working under the slogan "social networking that"s not for sale", has heaved up its head as an alternative to Twitter.
It has already amassed one million active monthly users, according to CEO and lead developer Eugen Rochko. Half a million users have joined the network since October 27. Before this time, it was only around 80 user registrations per hour; however, the number has now reached thousands of registrations per hour.
Among various reasons why users have started the shift from Twitter to Mastodon, one is the expanded verification coming at around $8 per month, the other is Musk"s approach to moderating impersonators that do not explicitly indicate that they are parody accounts while the major reason is how the workings of Twitter might change, not necessarily for better, under Musk"s leadership.
Unlike Twitter, Mastodon is ad-free and offers various microblogging features such as hashtags, replies, bookmarking, and boosting, similar to Twitter"s retweeting feature. If you want to join Mastodon as well, head over to the dedicated webpage here.
Source: TechCrunch