Twitter in crisis This day. Under new owner Elon Musk, the service has lost more than half of its staff through layoffs and retirements, has shown shaky moves in its product and platform strategy, and is facing reports about its financial situation.
That confusion, true tech industry style, has led to the emergence of many alternatives. Some are still germinating and some are fully formed and waiting to be in the spotlight.
One of the leaders that emerged was Mastodon. This is a network created with the ActivityPub protocol that runs the servers themselves and allows other users to join or establish their own servers to engage and view each other’s content .
In an interview with TechCrunch, Eugen Rochko, Mastodon’s creator and currently the only full-time employee, said the service is growing rapidly, now serving 2.5 million people on more than 8,600 different servers. says it has monthly active users. Mastodon directly operates several of these, the largest, mastodon.social, where he has 881,000 registered users, of which he has 210,000 active.
Rochko has shut down Mastodon’s servers for new signups. There are plenty of other places to register accounts and interact with the wider Mastodon universe, so this is a move he described as a “victimless decision”. It has created a demand situation: people and organizations are contacting Rochko and asking for access to get accounts on his servers anyway.
“The main reason registrations are currently closed is that scaling beyond the number of users is a huge burden for DevOps. [we have now],” he said. “I don’t want to say, ‘Oh, software is not good enough to scale.’ You can’t do all the fancy stuff and whatnot, instead of letting more people sign up, close registrations and let those who are already there offer quality service And I have to stay awake and sleepless nights fix things.
“The decentralized nature and the fact that there are plenty of other servers to choose from to sign up means it is a no-victim decision.”
Now, Rocco is looking to the next step in surgery.
Mastodon, as it currently exists, was set up as a non-profit organization and is funded in large part by a Patreon account from which Rochko currently earns $31,000 a month. Month… from $7,000. ”
Rochko said Mastodon will remain nonprofit, but is considering the split model he describes. And we might start a software-as-a-service for-profit side business. First, it offers Mastodon hosting for those who want it. “
Its purpose is to be a “sustainable and fair business…we only do hosting and the servers are completely under your control. Allows you to move to a hosting provider or migrate from another hosting provider.
Unlike the approach taken by word press, he said, has no plans to incorporate advertising as part of the hosted service. It’s a position that seems to come out of his own feelings, but he’s not outright denying them.
“We have to consider the feediverse nature of the network,” he said. “Anyone can develop another platform using the same ActivityPub protocol. [that Mastodon does], but there’s completely different software around it, with different expectations and different features. And if you want to incorporate ads, in theory you can.
“The only question is, as a user, do you visit services with advertisements? Do services track your interests and location to make those advertisements effective? We at Mastodon are not interested in the ad business or implementing ads in our code.But like I said, it’s free and open source so anyone can change it. They will do so at their own risk, using different business models.”
As for the operator of the Mastodon server, he remains open about it, but ironically he said he supports something similar to what Musk put forward on Twitter itself.
“I think there’s a way to sort of framework for building interoperable social media networks. Each individual server can be thought of as another social network like Tumblr or Instagram,” he said. Told. “With interoperability built right in, I think it makes sense that we can consider different business models and build different capabilities. I think the fairest model with is going to be a paid account model, which is what App.net has tried in the past and I don’t think it worked.Is it because of the paid account part or It wasn’t clear if it was because we didn’t actually build a great workhorse.”
He revealed he’s been talking to investors as well, but for the most part, it seems many of the people who want to give him money don’t really understand what he’s going for. One recurring theme is the idea of further commercializing the platform.
“Over the years, I have definitely received many unannounced cold contacts from various VCs. I used to ignore them, but now I have Felix [Hlatky], basically working as CFO, but no formal title yet. Now I forward them to him and then he tries to talk to them or sometimes I listen to the phone,” he said. I’ve tried talking to some VCs about the business, but they’re somehow more interested in getting into a major product and less in the sustainable hosting business. It doesn’t help here we’re never going to put them in the main product yeah we’ll probably have to go with angel investors or crowdfund the hosting business separately or I I don’t know, but personal funds might be enough. It’s not entirely clear.”
Mastodon has been known to garner a lot of attention following Twitter’s uproar. So much so that it triggered a new Musk-era rule that forbids linking to competing social networks. Suspending Mastodon’s Twitter presence in the process.
The approach to social space is also interesting.
Mastodon is based on the open source “federation” concept, where different servers use the same protocol to communicate with each other and share content. Server operators monitor the activity of users registered and hosted on their respective servers.
It may sound a little confusing to newbies, but there are tools out there that help you import your Twitter world into Mastodon and keep much of the same experience.
Following the metaphor, servers are like herds of animals, even mastodons, usually moving in the same direction, albeit distinctly. Away from the metaphor, however, Mastodon’s spirit hasn’t quite died out. detailedopen source is something that many other social media platforms (Twitter among them) are also taking very seriously.
Mastodon, in particular, seems to have really struck a chord. The platform’s mobile apps average about 4,000 downloads per day, with recent peaks of 149,000 downloads on Android and 235,000 on iOS.
Rochko said the surge came in the days when Twitter announced massive staff cuts, not only in the departments that manage communications with the media, but also in moderation, security, curation, and many technical teams.
Indeed, the opposite movement — Twitter’s decline equals Mastodon’s rise — is what is currently working very well for the latter.
The question is whether it will persist. Indeed, the ups and downs of Twitter as a platform have been a hallmark of the company almost from the beginning. Think of it as a utilitynot business.
Nevertheless, Twitter stayed and grew. This latest game has felt like a ‘final blow’ for many, but everything has calmed down and either users have finally come to terms with what will be the new status quo, or they’ll be making meaningful changes to social platforms. Only time will tell if this will really come.
Either way, technology evolution can appear to happen overnight, or it can take years. (Find out how Rochko spent on TC+ here.)
For Mastodon, the financial side of things remains a headache anyway.
For one thing, it helped the company grow. Rocco may be the only full-time employee, In addition to our financial Felix Hlatky, who is named on Mastodon’s overview page, there are five other people who work freelance as moderators on Mastodon’s own servers. One of his focuses was finding ways to get more people in a steady way.
According to Rochko, the $31,000 a month he makes through Patreon isn’t really stable enough to fund his staff. We provide a service to host Mastodon servers for others.
“I am the only full-time employee, and the other five are now contractors,” he said. “I’m looking to expand my full-time team and I’m working on some job listings. It’s kind of a slow process. I wish I could do it sooner. But this is six years alone It’s a new frontier for a company that has been in business.It’s been great so far, but now we need more people.”
