If you’re up-to-date with goings on on Twitter since Elon Musk took it over, then you’ll likely know what I’m on about. Otherwise you’re probably wondering if our next podcast is about fossil-hunting….
Mastodon is a social platform alternative to Twitter. It’s both very like Twitter but also very different from Twitter.
For a start it’s run and paid for by volunteers with donations from its users. Users are just users. Unlike on Twitter – and Facebook – Mastodon users are not a product to be sold to advertisers. It doesn’t have adverts. It also doesn’t have an algorithm driving what appears on your Mastodon timeline. What you see are the posts and reblogs from the people and #hashtags you follow. And that’s all you see. It has its own etiquette around posting and ways to post so as to make it as inclusive a platform as possible.
All of those things make Mastodon a much pleasanter experience than Twitter. If you are on Mastodon already, this is our Mastodon account name:
@ScottishIndyPod@mastodon.scot
Hop on over and have a look. We are still on Twitter. But if some of Musk’s ideas about unfettered free speech – and never mind if it’s inflammatory, false or insulting speech – get transferred to Twitter , we may abandon it.
Since October when Musk took over as CEO of Twitter, Mastodon’s users have increased nearly tenfold. Probably more by time you are reading this. And it’s growth pattern is in sync with some of Musk’s action as CEO. Mastodon it’s still small compared to Behemoth Twitter’s user base. I don’t suppose Musk is very bothered. Yet.
According to TitanBorn, there was a huge wave of new accounts after Elon’s takeover on Nov 17th, but the growth has normalized at about 50k new accounts/users per day. In the last few weeks, 1 million new accounts joined. If we keep this up, Mastodon will grow at at the speed of 1.5M accounts/users per month. If this happens, on Dec 2023 we should have at least 24 million Mastodon accounts. Huge!
If you want to find out more this is a good pace to start. Just click on the image.
