It still has a long way to go, a lot, but what is certain is that Mastodon has established itself as the true successor -and rival- of Twitter. Especially after a 2022 where Elon Musk’s outbursts and eccentricities have placed the bird’s social network in the most complicated position in its entire history.
Mastodon has taken advantage of the massive layoffs of Twitter workers, the flight of companies and advertisers and, of course, of users, to slowly but surely gain ground. and also with the support of other popular companies who support the stability of this new social network in the face of the minefield that Twitter represents.
Despite being launched in 2016, It has been in this 2022 when the microblogging social network has managed to reach a truly remarkable figure: 2.5 million users. Apart from users of all kinds, also professionals from the technological world, browser manufacturers, the cryptocurrency sector, journalists, NGOs, artists from different fields… According to The Guardian, an increase of 800% and all this despite the constant contempt on the part of by Elon Musk.
However, Musk knows that Mastodon can be a threat in the medium term and although the figures for both are far from overlapping, it has banned all links to the rival social network and has gone so far as to suspend users who tweet their Mastodon usernames. A measure that, however, has decided to back down.
Musk causing the rise of Mastodon
In MuyComputerPro we already have how Mastodon works. That it has found significant support in reputable companies that, without a doubt, will help you achieve more visibility. Among them Mozilla, the developer of the popular Firefox browser, which has not waited long to have a presence in it. In fact, it has already announced the execution of an “instance” of Mastodon, one of the decentralized servers on which the social network rests.
A Mastodon instance is similar to an email service provider.: Users can create different servers, which are called instances or communities. These instances allow both writing messages that are only read by their members and others that can be read in all the federated instances that make up Mastodon. One of the most popular instances is that of Eugen Rochko, a Russian-born German software developer and creator of Mastodon.
“Our intent is to contribute to the healthy and sustainable growth of a federated social space that not only operates, but thrives on its own terms, independent of profit- and control-driven tech companies,” said Steve Teixeira, Chief Product Officer. of Mozilla and added, “we are experiencing the consequences of 20 years of centralized and controlled social networks by corporations, with a small oligopoly of large technology companies that reinforce their control (…) going from the internet we have to the internet we want will be a costly work.”
Tumblr has also decided to strengthen ties with Mastodon. Matt Mullenweg, CEO of Automattic, the current owner of Tumblr, has encouraged registration on his platform, as it will soon add “activitypub” to allow interconnections. ActivityPub is an open source protocol used by various social platforms. to communicate with each other. Being one of the most popular services today: Mastodon. In this sense, anyone can download Mastodon and host it on their server, connecting and federating it.
