The chaotic takeover of Twitter by Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, has led to a user exodus in search of a more suitable replacement.
According to a graph posted by MIT associate professor Esteban Moro, over 135,000 people have signed up for Mastodon within only 24 hours, which is an open-source microblogging site comparable to Twitter in many ways.
The graph demonstrates how the number of new Mastodon users increased noticeably when Musk first made his pitch to buy Twitter, then quickly increased following his acquisition and the ensuing mass layoffs.
Soon, Moro said, “I’m going to need a logarithm scale.”
Open the Floodgates
Some Mastodon communities are at their wit’s end as a result of the enormous surge of users; their servers are working hard to keep up or even crash completely. Mastodon is a network of considerably smaller communities or “instances” that are connected but run separately from one another, unlike Twitter.
According to Mike Stone, cofounder of the Mastodon instance Fosstodon, “We can’t keep up with those demands, so we basically opened the floodgates.”
According to Mastodon founder Eugen Rochko, the number of users ballooned from 381,113 as of October 28 to well over one million active users earlier this week, across over 1,000 new servers.
As for Twitter, Musk told advertisers earlier this week that daily growth is on the rise, with more and more users flocking to the social media network.
Other estimates, however, suggest that a whopping 1.3 million accounts have been deleted or deactivated since Musk took over.
Sure, that’s only a small fraction of the 237.8 million monthly daily active users Twitter reported for this year’s second quarter.
But the company could be in trouble if the trend continues.
For one, Twitter’s leadership has been anything but predictable, from Musk unexpectedly rolling out and then killing new features to calling for baffling and impossible-to-enforce policy changes.
That all clearly has plenty of users wondering if there’s a better alternative out there. But whether Mastodon will survive the current onslaught of new users — and if those users will actually stick around in the long term — is anything but certain.
