Mastodon tops 10 million users

Defying its doubters, the upstart social media platform continues to grow

Mastodon, the federated social media platform, notched up its 10 millionth account over the weekend.

Launched in October 2016 by German developer Eugen Rochko, who remains Mastodon's only paid employee, for years the platform bumped along with a user base in the low hundreds of thousands, until Elon Musk's chaotic and divisive takeover of Twitter led millions to seek an alternative.

In truth, however, Mastodon is a very different beast from Twitter. It eschews advertising and consequently there is no attention-sucking recommender algorithm to optimise engagement. It also lacks a full text search function. Together with the relatively small user base compared with Twitter (which claims 237.8 million "monetisable daily active users") these combine to make it less of an up-to-the-minute source of breaking news, which is where Twitter really excels, and more of a considered platform for small-group conversations. Human nature being what it is, the bonhomie may decline as numbers grow, but at least confrontation is not algorithmically incentivised, as it is on platforms that rely on ever more eyeballs to survive.

So, not all those fleeing Musk's wounded bird will find in Mastodon the home from home they were hoping for - it's more than simply swapping the tweet for the toot - but its steadily growing user numbers are a rebuttal to critics who claimed its UX is just too off-putting, its decentralised concept too complex, and who predicted it would be a flash in the pan. In fact, Mastodon, which as recently as November had just one million accounts, continues to add new users at the rate of around 40,000 per day, and rising. It must be doing something right.

Mastodon's federated nature make it pretty immune to capture by any covetous billionaire or expansionist tech giant. That's because rather than being a company with an owner and a board, it is made up of thousands of interconnected servers, each with its own admins, rules, codes of conduct and features. In theory, an acquisitive company could snap up a few of the biggest instances and start to chuck its weight around, but it's relatively easy for users to up sticks and move to another instance, taking their social graph with them, and this would be the likely scenario.

The more technically minded can even set up their own server, as many groups, individuals and latterly companies have done - there are currently around 10,000 active Mastodon instances. Browser maker Vivaldi has set up its own instance (with native browser integration too), and Medium has one for paid subscribers. Mozilla and Flipboard are other recent joiners.

Mastodon has other cards up its sleeve too. Being based on the open W3C social web standard ActivityPub means it integrates with other platforms on services that also support ActivityPub (the 'Fediverse'), such as blog site Tumblr, photos platform Pixlfed, video system PeerTube and file hosting service Nextcloud. In addition, WordPress offers an ActivityPub plugin, meaning a blogger's posts will also appear on their Mastodon feed. Meta's prototype decentralised social network, codenamed P92, is also rumoured to be based on ActivityPub.

Federation goes some way to solving the moderation conundrums that beset social media platforms. Individual users or instance admins can block entire servers as well as individual offenders, and instances promoting hates speech or engaging in harassment, for example, can be added to a shared block list. However, this is currently rather a blunt instrument, and it remains to be seen whether an administrator of a small Mastodon instance will be held responsible for user-generated content on his or her server under legislation like the UK Online Safety Bill.

At this stage Mastodon's real trump card, though, is its potential for developers. As in the early days of Twitter, where external developers created many of the platform's best known features, third-party applications are already proliferating and filling some of the gaps in Mastodon's functionality. These include Tootfinder, a search app that indexes opted-in accounts, a personalised news aggregator, numerous bots and feeds of the type that Musk priced out when he severely downgraded free Twitter API access, and scores of alternative apps and interfaces for IOS, Android and web. And it's still early days.

Will it replace Twitter, assuming Musk succeeds in keeping his expensive plaything aloft? Probably not, but it (and more fundamentally ActivityPub) already marks the start of a more inclusive and less manipulative form of social media that might just catch on.