Enlarge / Let's look deep within. (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

I've been using fediverse stuff (Mastodon and, most recently, Calckey—I'm just going to use "Mastodon" as shorthand here; purists can bite me) for over a year now and have been doing so full time for about six months, following Elon Musk buying Twitter (since on principle, I decline to give Elon Musk money or attention ). This latter part coincided with the "November 2022 influx," when lots of new people joined Mastodon for similar reasons. A lot of that influx has not stuck around. Everyone is very aware at this point that active user numbers of Mastodon have dropped off a cliff.

I have evidence of this. I recently shut down my Mastodon instance that I started in November, mastodon.bloonface.com, and (as is proper) it sent out about 700,000 kill messages to inform other instances that it had federated with that it was going offline for good and to delete all record of it from their databases. Around 25 percent of these were returned undelivered because the instances had simply dropped offline. These are people and organizations who were engaged with Mastodon and fediverse to the point of investing real time and resources into it but simply dropped out without a trace sometime between November 2022 and now. I know multiple people who tried it and then gave up due to a lack of engagement with what they were posting, a lack of people to follow, an inability to deal with the platform's technical foibles, or, worse, because they found the experience actively unpleasant. Something has gone badly wrong.

There are some good reasons for this that really point to both shortcomings in the whole idea and also how Mastodon is and was sold to potential new users, some of which might be uncomfortable for existing Mastodon users to hear. There are some conclusions to draw from it, some of which might also be uncomfortable, but some which actually might be seen as reassuring to those who quite liked the place as it was pre-November and would prefer it if it would go back to that.

Enlarge (credit: Thomas Trutschel / Contributor | Photothek )

Since late 2022, Mastodon has increasingly become a popular alternative to Twitter for millions of users. This is partly because its CEO and founder, Eugen Rochko, has emphasized that the decentralized social network—which operates as a non-profit—will never be bought by a chaotic billionaire.

However, some would-be Mastodon users fleeing Twitter apparently never made it through Mastodon's slightly more complicated sign-up process. Some of them quickly abandoned Mastodon after creating an account, becoming instantly confused when they were asked to find a server to join. Because of this unfamiliar extra step that's not required to join most mainstream social networks, it seemed like Mastodon was missing out on a major opportunity to attract and retain Twitter users. These stakes likely only got higher after top Twitter influencers started joining another Twitter rival called Bluesky .

As Bluesky gained steam, Mastodon decided to listen to user feedback and take an unexpected step to make its platform more accessible than ever. Now, Mastodon will do what social networks traditionally do and default users to a server operated by Mastodon when they sign up. Acknowledging that Mastodon's sign-up process "can be confusing," Rochko announced that this tweak to Mastodon removes "friction from decentralized features" and makes it "as easy as possible" for new users to "get past the sign-up process and more quickly engage with others."

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

As Elon Musk's Category 5 tweetstorm continues, the once-obscure Mastodon social network has been gaining over 1,000 new refugees per hour , every hour, bringing its user count to about eight million.

Joining as a user is pretty easy. More than enough ex-Twitterers are happy finding a Mastodon instance via joinmastodon.org , getting a list of handles for their Twitter friends via Movetodon , and carrying on as before.

But what new converts may not realize is that Mastodon is just the most prominent node in a much broader movement to change the nature of the web.

Enlarge / Founder Eugen Rochko said Mastodon would not "turn into everything you hate about Twitter." (credit: NurPhoto via Getty Images)

Twitter rival Mastodon has rejected more than five investment offers from Silicon Valley venture capital firms in recent months, as its founder pledged to protect the fast-growing social media platform’s non-profit status.

Mastodon, an open-source microblogging site founded in 2016 by German software developer Eugen Rochko, has seen a surge in users since Elon Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion in October amid concerns over the billionaire’s running of the social media platform.

Rochko told the Financial Times he had received offers from more than five US-based investors to invest “hundreds of thousands of dollars” in backing the product, following its fast growth.

Enlarge (credit: NurPhoto via getty)

Rodti MacLeary started a Mastodon instance, mas.to , in 2019. By early November 2022, it had amassed around 35,000 users. But since Elon Musk bought Twitter and unleashed one chaotic decision after another , people have signed up for mas.to and other instances, or servers, in surging waves that have sometimes kicked them briefly offline . The influx of users is propelled by each haphazard policy update Musk professes from his own Twitter account. Last week, Twitter’s billionaire owner suspended several high-profile journalists and accused them of doxing him, and then briefly banned links to any social media competitors, including Mastodon. But the mas.to instance continued to grow, hitting 130,000 total users and 67,000 active users by Tuesday.

That’s minuscule compared to Twitter’s hundreds of millions of tweeters. But it’s a heavy lift for someone like MacLeary, who has a day job and no paid staff, and has funneled time and money into mas.to as a labor of love. As a decentralized, open-source social media platform, Mastodon is markedly different in its construction from Big Tech platforms like Meta, Twitter, and YouTube. That’s part of its appeal, and it’s working its way from a niche into the mainstream consciousness: Mastodon now has more than 9,000 instances and some nearly 2.5 million active monthly users.