But Still .27% the Size of Twitter

By Tuesday morning Mastodon had gained 123,562 new users since October 27 (the site told TechCrunch) and had 528,607 active users. But by Saturday the number of new users had nearly doubled, to 230,000, reports CNN — with 655,000 active users.

CNN's figures show that there's now one on Mastodon for every 363 active users on the micro-messaging site. Mastodon has a similar look toTwitter, with a timeline of short updates sorted chronologically. Rather than one central platform controlled by a single company, it lets users join a bunch of different server run by various groups and individuals. Mastodon is both free to use and free of advertisements. Eugen Rochko is the creator of Mastodon and runs the nonprofit that supports it. "It's the biggest that this network has ever been, even though it's not as large as Twitter, because it's more of a project than a consumer product," said Rochko, who created Mastodon as more of a project than a consumer product. A lot of Mastodon's features and layout will look and feel familiar to currentTwitter users, though with some slightly different terminology; you can follow others, create short posts, and you can upload images and videos. The network is set up in a number of different ways. The costs of hosting Mastodon users are spread among many different people. Users are spread out all over the place, and people you know can be hard to locate.

CNN also notes the problem with signing up for a Mastodon server: "some of which are open to anyone, some of which require an invitation (you can also run your own server). There is a server operated by the nonprofit behind Mastodon, Mastodon.social, but it's not accepting more users." Although trending on the server I found today: #Caturday photos.