Twitter Rival Is Growing Fast

While Twitter is in no danger of being trampled by Mastodon any time soon, the rival social media platform has been growing at an explosive pace since Elon Musk took charge of Twitter. According to a blog post Tuesday from Mastodon founder Eugen Rochko, the number of monthly active users on the platform jumped from 300,000 in October to 2.5 million in November, Musk's first full month as Twitter CEO. Despite the rapid growth in Mastodon users, some of it driven by Musk's controversial and apparently capricious leadership, the platform is still much smaller than Twitter, which reported 238 million monthly active users in July, CNN reports.

Dissatisfied Twitter users have also been turning to new platforms like Post and Hive, along with older ones like Tumblr and Reddit, though Musk claims Twitter usage in at an all-time high, reports the Verge. Musk recently banned, then unbanned, the sharing of links to Twitter users' profiles on Mastodon and other rival social networks. "As a company from eastern Germany, we know that building a wall to try and keep people from leaving isn't a good idea," Mastodon quipped on its Twitter account, which was briefly banned at the same time numerous tech journalists were banned for referring to an account that tracked Musk's private jet.

In his blog post, Rochko said events at Twitter showed the value of a decentralized platform like Maston compared to centralized platforms that can "impose arbitrary and unfair limits on what you can and can't say." He said more and more journalists, political figures and organizations are moving to Mastodon. "Understanding that freedom of the press is absolutely essential for a functional democracy, we are excited to see Mastodon grow and become a household name in newsrooms across the world, and we are committed to continuing to improve our software to face up to new challenges that come with rapid growth and increasing demand," he wrote. (More social media stories.)