Elon Musk is now set to take over Twitter after Twitter’s board approved Musk’s buyout offer. Several people, who are not happy with this deal, are now looking to join alternate social media platforms. Twitter’s alternative Mastodon confirmed that it has seen a surge in new users since Musk’s acquisition. The platform recorded over 30,000 new users in just a single day.
Apps of Mastodon have also been downloaded roughly 5,000 times since Monday. Now Mastodon’s iOS app ranks No. 32 on the App Store charts for social media apps.
Mastodon is also a microblogging service similar to Twitter but with a slightly different concept. It is free and open-source software for running a self-hosted social media service. so, you can create your own social media platforms with your own rules and moderation policies. All the Mastodon instances hosted on different servers are called instances. The software features the ActivityPub standard for communication that lets users interact with users on other servers. That means there is no central Mastodon website.
Mastodon also operates its two instances mastodon.social and mastodon.online. These servers are already overloaded, so the company suggests joining other communities on the service via other official apps.
Mastodon lets users publish 500-character messages with pictures, polls, and videos. The interface is similar to Twitter.
This is not the first time when Mastodon is in the spotlight, but the service has yet to become a mainstream social media platform.
