As many users seek alternatives to X, rival social network Mastodon says that its official app downloads are up 47% on iOS.
Mastodon founder Eugen Rochko says downloads on Android are also up 17%, while total monthly sign-ups rose approximately 27% to 90,000.
The open-source X rival functions much like its competitor, the site formerly known as Twitter, on the outside. However, unlike the centralized Twitter, Mastodon consists of thousands of different social networks, which are integrated into a web it calls the “fediverse.”
Fantastic! I’m reducing my dependency on for profit entities every day, and federation is a great means to that end. Let’s welcome those moving over during the exodus!
Make sure to actually understand how those “non-profit” websites and services are functioning.
It costs money to power servers and to maintain them. Most of the fediverse instances like to claim they are run on donations and so forth. But… think about how angry people get at the idea of tipping for ANYTHING and then wonder how many of those are throwing significant cash at your favorite lemmy or mastodon instance per month.
Everyone is always shocked when they find out how social media or a “free” vpn or whatever is funded and where there information is going. But hey, I am sure it will be completely different this time.
The guy who runs the instance I’m on sends out a statement every month, detailing how much he’s received in donations, what everything has cost, and how much there is leftover. Accounting for a small buffer to allow for emergencies, he donates the excess to Alzheimer’s research. We’re a Pritchett focus instance, so everyone’s happy with that.
I’ve paid far more to my Masto admin than I ever did to Twitter.
You can be against the US’s tipping culture while at the same time being someone who donates to things lol
But yeah, definitely. For a lot of these things the funding has to be coming from somewhere and there’s no way donations are enough.
But hey, I am sure it will be completely different this time.
Exactly.
I’d love to join them, but most of my friends just didn’t like mastodon. Mostly because the discoverability was horrible. You need to know what instance your friend is on.
I still use it personally, but mostly for OSS dev side of things
The weird thing is that it doesn’t matter what instance/server your friends are on. If they follow you, they’ll get all your posts in their feed. The best advice I can give anyone starting out on Mastodon is to follow tags instead of people in order to surface interesting posts, then you can follow people as they come up on feeds.
I mean, it’s just like e-mail addresses, I really don’t understand the difficulty. Yes technically if I want to e-mail joe smith, I need to know his address, including what mail provider he uses. Which is why when I ask for his e-mail address he tells me “Joesmith@gmail.com”. and not just joesmith.
That’s good news. Odds are that some of those people will go back to closed media platforms after ~2 months; but the ones who stay help Mastodon and the Fediverse to grow.
Good to hear at least some upside for Mastadon from the recent rise in Bluesky users.
Hopefully this trend will continue and and Mastadon can retain at least a solid percentage of those why try it.
