Two weeks ago, the only people who had heard of Mastodon were those interested in online technology (or confused heavy metal fans or palaeontologists).
Then, two weeks ago Elon Musk completed his acquisition of Twitter, widely seen as the most important online public square.
From that moment, sign-ups for microblogging service Mastodon began to increase. Then, Musk, made a series of appalling tweets, offered strange policy decisions, and Twitter announced massive lay-offs.
The Mastodon stampede began — especially in Ireland. Mastodon (actually named after the band) is non-commercial, free and open-source software (FOSS) that enables anyone to set up a social network service, for just themselves, maybe with friends, or within an organisation, or as a community others can join.
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Each installation on a server is called an “instance”. All the instances across the world can interlink — or “federate” — using a standard protocol called Activity Pub, and most do, forming a global “fediverse”.
Mastodon’s look and feel are similar to Twitter, offering a relatively easy transition for people, although some elements can be baffling at first — especially having to join a specific instance/community, rather than just sign up to a single service, as with commercial platforms like Twitter or Facebook.
Mastodon posts are also equal opportunity reads: nothing is boosted or recommended by Mastodon to a member because no opaque algorithms manage posts
The biggest difference is that Mastodon is designed to eliminate structural aspects of Twitter that make it easy to use it to attack and bully others, to self-promote and grandstand, or to make more contentious posts, which more easily become viral and get more follows and likes.
Mastodon posts are also equal opportunity reads: nothing is boosted or recommended by Mastodon to a member because no opaque algorithms manage posts. Each instance also has its own rules and moderation approaches but the overall intent is to keep communities safer and calmer than Twitter — and to get people talking to, not at, each other.
The Irish Mastodon instance, Mastodon.ie, offers insight into the platform’s astonishing scale of growth, and evidence of how a tipping point was quickly reached where significant numbers were moving to a service they’d mostly never heard of before. Mastodon instances everywhere, including Ireland, struggled with the extraordinary influx.
When I joined in October, fewer than 200 people were on the instance (when you ask to set up an account, the instance asks for a reason; I just wrote “Elon” and was swiftly approved).
As of Wednesday, some 13,000 people had joined, most in the previous seven days, and had created a new hashtag for themselves: #MastoDaoine. Incredibly, Mastodon.ie managed to keep the service functioning, albeit with occasional slowdowns.
Is the tech crunch a correction or a calamity?
Bernard McKeever is the reason why. He set up Mastodon.ie in Dublin in 2019, and ran it alone until April, when numbers bumped up slightly after Musk made his Twitter bid, so McKeever added one moderator.
The real deluge began on November 1st when the Rubber Bandits tweeted about it and Mastodon.ie grew to 300 users. Then it exploded. “On average I’d say we’re [adding] a little over 100 {users] an hour, but it’s difficult to tell,” he says.
As managing the site became more complex, McKeever moved the instance to a hosting service that specialises in Mastodon instances. “That move saved us in the end,” he says.
Since November 1st, he’s had to upgrade his hosting tier level four times, noting he “was in denial” as to whether he needed to go for the top tier until the last minute. The hosting service “worked with us to better understand where performance bottlenecks happen and what they and we can do to work around them”. Even as some instances faltered and closed registrations, the Irish site stayed up.
He’s added more moderators and is making future plans. “Our immediate plan is to hand off ownership to a collective, allowing the community to have a say in how it’s run and to give folks a sense of belonging through ownership. We want to ensure that the instance is welcoming to folks from all walks of life and have actively recruited a diverse mod team, which we’re continuing to expand.”
While Mastodon’s global membership base is only six million compared to Twitter’s 232 million, it has accomplished a history-making step, in just a week
Like all instances, Mastodon.ie is run by volunteers and covers its costs by crowdfunding donations. “The volunteer aspect of this effort definitely makes it feel like a community and people seem to really want to be a part of that,” he says.
While Mastodon’s total global membership base is only six million, compared to Twitter’s more than 200 million daily users, it has accomplished a history-making step, in just a week, becoming the first open, free, non-commercial, and non-data surveilling social media platform that mainstream users have (ahem) flocked to.
Mastodon has proven that, after more than a decade of user inertia, people are willing to transfer loyalty — to a new, non-commercial, less toxic platform. Plus, Mastodon isn’t an isolated service. It’s part of many interconnected services that can replace sites like Facebook, Instagram, SoundCloud, and YouTube. Users don’t need separate memberships for each, and none is commercial, none surveils and none monetises user data.
Any commercial, data-monetising social media platform which isn’t feeling worried right now just isn’t paying attention.
