A day after Twitter imposed new limits on the number of posts users can view (based on their verification status), rival social media platform Mastodon experienced a substantial boost in traffic. Eugen Rochko, the company’s creator and CEO, posted on July 2nd that its active user base had increased by no less than 110,000.
Mastodon presents itself as a Twitter-like service, though highlighting that it’s user-driven and decentralized. While Twitter relies on a central entity, Mastodon operates using a network of a multitude of spread out computer servers, mostly administrated by volunteers. Rochko thanked the Mastodon team for promptly countering the upsurge in demand on “a Sunday” on top of reposting posts by veteran users and Mastodon developers, for instance the advice from Courtney Heard to new users: “Follow as many people and hashtags as you can – this isn’t Twitter without an algorithm -you curate it yourself and it’s much more vibrant and rewarding than Twitter has been for the last year.”
At the time of writing, Mastodon accounts boasted 324,000 active users. This amplified commotion coincided with the announcement by Elon Musk (then the CEO, today the owner of Twitter) of limiting the number of posts accounts can view in a day – verified accounts up to 10,000 and uncertified ones only 500. Without referencing a precise motivation, he tweeted about the website “getting information pillaged so savagely that it was degrading the performance for usual users.” Recent evidence too showed a tendency among many facets of the Twitter community of religious and political bias .
