Mastodon now has over 1 million users amid Twitter tensions

guest · Nov 8, 2022

By Bill Toulas @billtoulas - November 7, 2022

Mastodon, the free, open-source, decentralized micro-blogging social media platform, has surpassed a million monthly active users for the first time in its history.
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The platform's explosive growth was announced today by Eugen Rochko, the creator of Mastodon, who noted that almost half of the new users (489,000) joined the platform since October 27, 2022, when Elon Musk's sealed the purchase of Twitter.

Hey, so, we've hit 1,028,362 monthly active users across the network today. 1,124 new Mastodon servers since Oct 27, and 489,003 new users. That's pretty cool.
Eugen (@Gargron@mastodon.social) - Nov 07, 2022, 06:53
The sudden influx of users to Mastodon is caused by a notable wave of migration from Twitter, as it uses a similar interface and social feed format.
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Mastodon features 500-character posts called "toots" arranged in a chronological feed, user tagging (mentions), privacy posting options, a hashtags system, and more.
Mastodon's moment
While Mastodon looks similar to Twitter, it's fundamentally different, operating on a network of self-hosted servers (instances) that each has its own terms, privacy options, and content moderation policies.

Thanks to this decentralized approach, Mastodon does not belong to a single person or company, and it's not operated for profit, so there are no ads, although people may still promote services independently.
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Whether or not the user migration to Mastodon will have the duration to shape a new reality in the social media industry or if an entirely new platform will pop up to take advantage of the situation is too early to tell.
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Mastodon

Your home feed should be filled with what matters to you most, not what a corporation thinks you should see. Radically different social media, back in the hands of the people.
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Website
Get the App
Servers

Mastodon is not a single website. To use it, you need to make an account with a provider—we call them servers—that lets you connect with other people across Mastodon.
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guest · Nov 8, 2022

Twitter users jump to Mastodon - but what is it?
By Zoe Kleinman, Technology editor, BBC News - November 6, 2022

In the wake of Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter, some users have been seeking alternative platforms. One of the biggest beneficiaries has been Mastodon. But what is it?
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On the surface Mastodon looks like Twitter - account users write posts (called "toots"), which can be replied to, liked and re-posted, and they can follow each other.

Under the bonnet, though, it works in a different way.
That's one of the reasons it is attracting fresh users, but it has caused some confusion to new people signing up.

Ok, I’ve joined #Mastodon but also this pic.twitter.com/2Uue7E4BR8
— Sinéad Crowley (@SineadCrowley) November 4, 2022
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The platform is six years old but its current activity is unprecedented and it is struggling under the weight of new joiners.

Here's a brief guide to finding your way around it.
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guest · Nov 9, 2022

Mastodon: What you need to know for your security and privacy
If you’re leaving Twitter for Mastodon, here are some things you should know.
By Graham Cluley @gcluley - November 8, 2022

Mastodon is hot right now. After some years of only being used by geeks (yes, I’ve had an account for a while now) it’s at the tipping point of becoming mainstream… all because of two words:
Elon Musk.

So what’s the alternative. Many consider Mastodon to be a good new home. It’s free and ad-free, it doesn’t mine your data, it’s decentralised (which means that – unlike Twitter – there’s not one entity or [...] billionaire in charge of your content).
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It’s perfectly possible – if you’re nerdy enough and fancy the job of maintaining a web server – to create your own Mastodon ‘instance’ (the name Mastodon users commonly use for a server) and be able to talk to anyone else on Mastodon.

Compare this level of control to your traditional social networks like Facebook or Twitter which control what you get to see in your timeline, mine for your personal data, and bombard you with targeted ads.
Mastodon isn’t like that.
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But what I want to do in this article is mention some of the security and privacy considerations you should make if you’re going to start using Mastodon.
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guest · Nov 21, 2022

Security Researchers Looking at Mastodon as Its Popularity Soars
By Eduard Kovacs @EduardKovacs - November 21, 2022

Cybersecurity researchers are increasingly looking at Mastodon now that the decentralized social media platform’s popularity has soared, and they have started finding vulnerabilities and other security issues.
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After Elon Musk acquired Twitter, he made a series of significant changes, including firing staff and modifying features, which have had a negative impact on the platform’s security. This has led to a Twitter security chief resigning and the FTC saying that they were deeply concerned.

Many Twitter users have been looking at alternatives and one of them has been Mastodon, which over the weekend reported passing more than 2 million active monthly users, with hundreds of thousands of new users signing up every week since Musk officially took over Twitter.
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Much of the cybersecurity community has joined the ‘Infosec.exchange’ instance on Mastodon and some researchers have already started identifying issues, including ones specific to this server and ones that could impact the entire platform.

Gareth Heyes, a researcher at PortSwigger, discovered earlier this month that the Infosec.exchange instance was affected by an HTML injection vulnerability that could have been exploited to steal users’ credentials.
The attack involved abusing Chrome’s autofill feature to steal users’ stored credentials by getting the targeted user to click on a malicious element on a page.
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The administrator of the Infosec.exchange server quickly addressed the issue, but Alevski found similar problems on a couple of other popular Mastodon instances as well.

Researcher Anurag Sen reported on November 15 that he discovered someone scraping user data from Mastodon.
According to HackRead, the database, which appears to belong to a third party, can be accessed without authentication and the researcher could not determine who it belongs to.
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Daveski17 · Nov 21, 2022

I never used Twitter, I never will. I don't know about Mastodon, sounds like a bit of a dinosaur. I won't use them either.

Rasheed187 · Dec 3, 2022

BTW, Vivaldi has launched on Mastodon, I must say it doesn't look bad.

https://social.vivaldi.net/@Vivaldi

monkeylove · Dec 8, 2022

"Most people who threatened to quit Twitter for Mastodon haven't left"

Of more than 140,000 Twitter users who announced they were moving to Mastodon, just 1.6 per cent have actually quit Elon Musk’s social media platform
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xxJackxx · Dec 8, 2022

monkeylove said: ↑

"Most people who threatened to quit Twitter for Mastodon haven't left"
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No threat like an idle one. I was gonna cancel my internet if they raised the price again. Still using it. Don't wanna take a day off and have to schedule it and deal with the process of re configuring things for another provider... People only follow up on such things if it isn't inconvenient to do so.

guest · Jan 2, 2023

Twitter rival Mastodon rejects funding to preserve nonprofit status
Open source microblogging site has seen surge of interest since Musk took over Twitter.
Ian Johnston, Financial Times - December 28, 2022

Twitter rival Mastodon has rejected more than five investment offers from Silicon Valley venture capital firms in recent months, as its founder pledged to protect the fast-growing social media platform’s non-profit status.
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Mastodon, an open source microblogging site founded in 2016 by German software developer Eugen Rochko, has seen a surge in users since Elon Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion in October amid concerns over the billionaire’s running of the social media platform.

Rochko told the Financial Times he had received offers from more than five US-based investors to invest “hundreds of thousands of dollars” in backing the product, following its fast growth.
But he said the platform’s non-profit status was “untouchable,” adding that Mastodon’s independence and the choice of moderation styles across its servers were part of its attraction.

“Mastodon will not turn into everything you hate about Twitter,” said Rochko. “The fact that it can be sold to a controversial billionaire, the fact that it can be shut down, go bankrupt and so on. It’s the difference in paradigms [between the platforms].”
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Josh Cowls, a researcher at the Oxford Internet Institute, said Mastodon could evolve into a “satellite” platform to Twitter, “seeing greater use at times when Twitter is down, as well as in response to further Musk-related outrages.”

Rochko said his long-term ambition for Mastodon was to replace Twitter and other commercial social networks. “It’s a long road ahead but at the same time, it’s bigger than it ever has been.”
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guest · Jan 2, 2023

Mastodon—and the pros and cons of moving beyond Big Tech gatekeepers
Standards-based interoperability makes a comeback, sort of.
By Ben Klemens - January 2, 2023

As Elon Musk's Category 5 tweetstorm continues, the once-obscure Mastodon social network has been gaining over 1,000 new refugees per hour, every hour, bringing its user count to about eight million.

But what new converts may not realize is that Mastodon is just the most prominent node in a much broader movement to change the nature of the web.
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With a core goal of decentralization, Mastodon and its kin are "federated," meaning you are welcome to put up a server as a home base for friends and colleagues (an "instance"), and users on all instances can communicate with users on yours.
With cosmic ambitions, the new federation of freely communicating instances is called "the Fediverse."
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The decentralization aspect that was such a selling point for me was also a core design goal for Mastodon and the predecessors it built upon, such as GNU Social. In an interview with Time, lead developer Eugen Rochko said that he began development of Mastodon in 2016 because Twitter was becoming too centralized and too important to discourse.

"Maybe it should not be in the hands of a single corporation,” he said. His desire to build a new system “was generally related to a feeling of distrust of the top-down control that Twitter exercised."
As with many a web app, Mastodon is a duct taping together of components and standards; hosting or interacting with a Mastodon instance requires some familiarity with all of these. Among them, and the headliner at the heart of The Fediverse, is the ActivityPub standard of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which specifies how actors on the network are defined and interact.
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guest · Jan 12, 2023

Medium embraces Twitter alternative Mastodon with launch of its own community
By Sarah Perez @sarahintampa - January 12, 2023

Online publishing platform Medium, originally created by Twitter co-founder Evan Williams, announced today that it’s embracing the open source Mastodon platform by creating its own instance to support its authors and their publications. The company said it’s launching me.dm, a Mastodon community that will offer reliable infrastructure, moderation and a short domain name to make it easier for authors to share their usernames, among other things.
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Though launched six years ago, Mastodon has more recently gained traction as users flee Elon Musk’s Twitter.
The social microblogging platform has grown to 2.5 million monthly active users in recent days, up from just 300,000 in October 2022.

The company will open up Mastodon to Medium writers and readers as an additional perk of Medium membership, creating a place for discussions around Medium’s content. This will result in an “interesting local feed,” the company explained in its announcement.
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Though it may seem odd for a longer-form blogging platform to embrace a platform designed for much shorter posts, Medium believes it’s worth operating in both spaces.

“To date, we’ve focused on article-length writing. It’s how our company got its name: as a home for medium-length writing on the internet. By contrast, Mastodon is primarily for short-form writing of 500 characters or less … Today we are extending what we do into the short-form medium (lowercase m) with an instance on Mastodon, me.dm,” he said.
Medium’s move to embrace Mastodon isn’t only because it sees the platform as “an emerging force for good in social media,” as Stubblebine wrote, when explaining the company’s interest in the space.
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monkeylove · Jan 13, 2023

https://www.secjuice.com/mastodon-child-porn-pedophiles/

Flash forward to 2022 and those two giant Mastodon child porn communities currently rank second and third on the fediverse leaderboard in terms of user numbers, making up the two largest instances on Mastodon after mastodon.social which holds first place with more users. But they are the two most active communities by a large margin in terms of total postings, ranking first and second with 60 million posts each against mastodon.social's 40 million posts.

...

These large communities are the visible tip of the Mastodon child porn iceberg, orbiting in a federation around these large instances are thousands of smaller groups federated into their ecosystem, these are the more extreme child porn communities. None of us really wants to explore that part of the fediverse and it makes us all sick to our stomachs knowing that there are so many of those communities on Mastodon. Not only do they make up more than half of the Mastodon userbase, but they are also the busiest communities in the fediverse.
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guest · Jan 20, 2023

Tapbot shuts down Tweetbot as it pivots to Mastodon
By Jon Fingas @jonfingas - January 20, 2023

Now that Twitter has confirmed it's banning third-party clients, some of the most prominent alternatives are going away. Tapbots has shut down work on Tweetbot, one of the more popular iOS apps, as Twitter rendered it non-functional "in a blink of an eye." The developer is instead pivoting to Ivory, an app for the open social platform Mastodon. While it's limited to an invitation-only test for now, Tapbots hopes to make the software "better than Tweetbot ever could be."
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guest · Jan 24, 2023

Section platform makes it easier to deploy Mastodon servers
By Ian Barker @IanDBarker - January 24, 2023

Following Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, Mastodon has been the platform of choice for many of the people seeking to flee the blue bird platform, or just looking for a lifeboat in case Twitter finally sinks.
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One of the strengths of Mastodon, but also one of its drawbacks, is its distributed, open source nature whereby people can stand up their own Mastodon servers. This means there's no central control, however, you need some technical expertise to create and run a server.

Now though cloud hosting platform Section is making it easier to deploy and scale a Mastodon server. With just a few clicks, developers can use Section's global platform to ensure a superior user experience at low cost.

"For those looking to create their own Mastodon server, the technical headaches, management decisions and ballooning costs that come with getting started can be incredibly debilitating," says Stewart McGrath, Section’s CEO. "Even the so-called 'one-click' solutions quickly begin to show their cracks as communities grow and become geographically dispersed. Given the growth Mastodon is experiencing, this requires planning ahead -- and Section has customized its platform to make it painless and cost-effective to deploy your Mastodon server at scale."
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Developers looking to get started with Mastodon or boost existing deployments can find out more on the Section site.
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guest · Jan 28, 2023

Like users, app developers are fleeing Twitter for Mastodon
Can independent developers do for Mastodon what they did for Twitter?
By Karissa Bell @karissabe - January 28, 2023

When Twitter quietly updated its developer policies to ban third-party clients from its platform, it abruptly closed an important chapter of Twitter’s history. Unlike most of its counterparts, which tightly control what developers are able to access, Twitter has a long history with independent app makers.
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Now, the developers of some Twitter clients are turning their attention to another upstart platform: Mastodon. This week, Tapbots, the studio behind Tweebot, released Ivory, a Mastodon client based on its longtime Twitter app. Matteo Villa, the developer behind Twitter app Fenix, is testing a Mastodon client of his own called Wooly. Junyu Kuang, the indie developer behind Twitter client Spring is working on a Mastodon app called Mona. Shihab Mehboob, developer of Twitter app Aviary, is close to launching a Mastodon client called Mammoth.

The one-time Twitter developers join a growing group of independent app makers who have embraced Mastodon, the open-source social network that’s seen explosive growth since Elon Musk took over Twitter. The decentralized service now has more than 1.5 million users across nearly 10,000 servers. That, coupled with Mastodon’s open-source, “API-first” approach, has attracted dozens of developers eager to put their own spin on the service.
Thomas Ricouard, the developer behind Ice Cubes, a Mastodon app that launched earlier this month, says that he had considered building an app with Twitter's API in the past, but decided against it because it was “looking more and more limited as the days passed.”
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On its part, Mastodon has welcomed developer interest even though it maintains its own mobile apps. “It's exciting because it means that a lot of very talented people are investing their time and resources into building on the platform and ecosystem that we have built up,” Mastodon founder and CEO Eugen Rochko tells Engadget.

Developers’ contributions also have the potential to influence the direction of the platform itself.
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monkeylove · Jan 30, 2023

"Mastodon loses 30% of its active users after Twitter fears die down"

guest · Feb 4, 2023

Twitter has killed Movetodon, the service that simplified moving from Twitter to Mastodon
By Sofia Wyciślik-Wilson @Sofia_W_W - February 4, 2023

The exodus from Twitter to Mastodon shows little signs of slowing down, and numerous websites and services have popped up to make it easier to jump to the decentralized social network. One such tool is Movetodon, designed to help anyone moving to Mastodon to find the people they were previously following on Twitter.
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Movetodon has proved incredibly popular, but it has just been killed off by Twitter. The Elon Musk-owned site announced this week that it is ending free access to its API on February 9, but ahead of this, Twitter has blocked Movetodon's access to the API rendering the service non-functionable, alleging violation of unspecified rules and policies.
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Although Twitter has already made it clear that third-party clients are unwelcome and have been torpedoed, Movetodon does not fall under this banner. And while Twitter has announced its plans to bring free access to its API to an end -- an API that Movetodon clearly makes use of -- this is not supposed to kick in for a number of days.

So, what's going on?
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The creator of Movetodon, Tibor Martini, posted to Mastodon saying:

So you may have noticed that the Twitter login of https://movetodon.org/ is not working at the moment.
According to twitter, the app "has violated Twitter Rules and policies". I can't tell much more at the moment since the email they mention never arrived in my inbox.
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reasonablePrivacy · Feb 4, 2023

mood said: ↑

Twitter has killed Movetodon, the service that simplified moving from Twitter to Mastodon
By Sofia Wyciślik-Wilson @Sofia_W_W - February 4, 2023
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In EU big companies are legally required to allow users export data in human readable format. Does Twitter supports that or is breaking law?

XIII · Feb 4, 2023

Last time I tried I could still download my data from Twitter.

The export function is on Twitter’s website, so not affected by the shutdown of the third party API.

guest · Feb 8, 2023

Mastodon's active user growth declines after months of steady rise
By Justin Luna @_justinluna - February 8, 2023

Ever since business magnate Elon Musk took over Twitter back in late October last year, many Twitter users have flocked to Mastodon, a decentralized social media platform. It has steadily gained users, reaching one million in November and 2.5 million shortly after.
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However, it seems that the Mastodon hype has officially peaked, as the platform's active monthly user count fell to 1.4 million by late January. This means that Mastodon now has nearly half a million fewer total registered users compared to the beginning of the year.

As Wired points out, this drop could be due to many users complaining that Mastodon is difficult to use.

"There is no quick guide to start, so you are on your own to wade through Mastodon’s quirks," said Jesus Diaz of Fast Company.
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While the game is not over yet, it clearly seems that it will take some time for Mastodon to become a true contender for Twitter.

Source: Wired
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guest · Feb 10, 2023

Cloudflare wants to help you set up your own Mastodon server in ‘minutes’
By Jon Porter @JonPorty - February 10, 2023

Wildebeest is a new project from Cloudflare that’s designed to make it easier for individuals to set up and run their own Mastodon-compatible servers. It highlights one of the key strengths of Mastodon over centralized competitors like Twitter, which is that anyone can host an instance of the microblogging service that’s connected it to the wider network (aka Fediverse).

“You can quickly deploy your Mastodon-compatible server on top of Cloudflare and connect it to the Fediverse in minutes,” Cloudflare’s Celso Martinho and Sven Sauleau write in a co-authored blog post. “You don’t need to worry about maintaining or protecting it from abuse or attacks; Cloudflare will do it for you automatically.”
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Cloudflare’s Wildebeest helps configure Mastodon’s software and manage updates, leaving you with the benefits of being in charge of your own corner of social media, including having control over your personal data. Cloudflare emphasizes that while its systems can help with the setup and management of a server, you’re the one who’s in charge.

“Wildebeest is not a managed service,” Martinho and Sauleau explain, “It’s your instance, data, and code running in our cloud under your Cloudflare account.”
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While Cloudflare is attempting to make the technical side of running a Mastodon instance easier, being responsible for even a small pocket of social media users can create some big non-technical challenges, which FT Alphaville outlined when it shut down its own Mastodon server last month.

If that hasn’t scared you off, then CloudFlare advertises that while “most” of Wildebeest’s features can be tried out for free, anyone looking to run a server will need to pay for an Images plan, which starts at $5 a month, and potentially a Workers Unbound plan depending on server load.
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Cloudflare: Welcome to Wildebeest: the Fediverse on Cloudflare

By Celso Martinho @celso, Sven Sauleau @svensauleau - February 10, 2023
The Fediverse has been a hot topic of discussion lately, with thousands, if not millions, of new users creating accounts on platforms like Mastodon to either move entirely to "the other side" or experiment and learn about this new social network.

Today we're introducing Wildebeest, an open-source, easy-to-deploy ActivityPub and Mastodon-compatible server built entirely on top of Cloudflare's Supercloud. If you want to run your own spot in the Fediverse you can now do it entirely on Cloudflare.
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ronjor · Sep 21, 2023

Mastodon’s latest release makes the open source Twitter alternative easier to use

Sarah Perez@sarahintampa September 21, 2023
As changes at Elon Musk’s X continue to push former Twitter users to seek alternatives, the open-sourced, decentralized social network Mastodon — a popular Twitter/X rival — is releasing an update designed to make it easier for users to get started
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