730%. This is the three-digit growth in the number of monthly active users that Mastodon has just experienced. Eugen Rochko, founder of the neo-social network, shared encouraging data in his last blog post dated December 20.
Growth to put into perspective
In detail, the number of monthly active users of Mastodon has increased from around 300,000 in October to more than 2.5 million in November. A real success, however, to scale the sector of social networks. In the second quarter of 2022, Facebook had 2.9 billion monthly active users, according to data from the Statista Research Department.
Eugen Rochko is also pleased to have been able to recruit a qualified audience, “with more and more journalists, politicians, writers, actors and organizations”. The social network being designed in a totally decentralized way, institutions can create their own instance. The founder of the platform cites in particular the case of the German government or the European Commission, which were able to “run their own Mastodon servers where they post important information that is broadcast to thousands of their subscribers”.
Rochko also mentions major recruitments in the press sector. Tired of Twitter, several journalists turned to Mastodon. “Aware that freedom of the press is absolutely essential to a functioning democracy, we are delighted to see Mastodon grow and become a household name in newsrooms around the world”rejoices the founder.
Imbroglio at Twitter
Rapid growth that does not please Twitter. For several days, some users of the blue bird network have been unable to share a link to a Mastodon instance. They would receive a message indicating “that the links have been identified as ‘potentially dangerous’”says Eugen Rochko.
This difficulty is in addition to the ephemeral ban on promoting other social media on Twitter. For a few hours, Sunday, December 18, Musk’s network had indeed strictly prohibited the sharing of links to competing platforms. Since then, the management has backpedaled, believing that it was a mistake.
Asked during a Space Twitter by a twitto, this Wednesday, December 21, to find out if users could share links to Mastodon’s servers, Elon Musk replied: “Yeah, we can post Mastodon all day, I don’t care.”