Despite being around for more than six years, Mastodon has ascended the app store rankings since Musk completed his takeover on Oct. 27. Mastodon’s primary mobile app was downloaded 750,000 times worldwide between Oct. 28 and Nov. 6, according to the app analytics firm Sensor Tower. That’s 53-times more than the previous 11-day period when it had only 14,000 downloads.
Given Mastodon’s 1 million cumulative downloads over its six-year history, three-quarters of its total registered users have joined since Musk’s acquisition. Whether the network can provide a viable alternative is another question.
How to get on Mastodon Mastodon resembles Twitter in a lot of ways. The primary differentiator is that it is not run by a single company. Anyone can fire up a server to power the free, open-source software. The different “instances”—essentially different servers running the same software—allow people to create different versions of Mastadon with unique content rules. All of these instances connect to one another. So a new user can choose their server, yet still see all the content from different Mastodon instances.
The analogy with Twitter is that users can create their own version of Twitter, governed by its own content moderation rules, yet the tweets themselves are visible across an entire federation of Twitter versions. That’s Mastodon.
This idea isn’t exclusive to Mastodon. When he was still CEO of Twitter, Jack Dorsey started a decentralized social media project called Bluesky, which has yet to launch, promising to do something similar while deriving funding from Twitter.
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