Boosted by Twitter drama, Mastodon reaches 1 million active monthly users

Mastodon has over one million active monthly users. According to CEO and lead developer Eugen Rochko, the milestone was revealed in a post on Monday.

Mastodon, a Germany-based social network, has seen a rapid increase in users since Musk took over the company. Mastodon's user base grew from 60-80 new user registration per hour prior to October 27 to thousands of registration per hour today.

Mastodon's expansion has been boosted by recent product changes. Some users switched to Mastodon to protest against the new paid verification scheme and Musk's heavy-handed approach to moderation, while others joined as a protest against the new paid verification scheme and Musk's heavy-handed approach to moderation.

Mastodon offers an experience that is similar to that of a social networking site. The network is ad-free and distributed across thousands of server that are run by volunteers who are part of a federation.

Mastodon users can swap posts and links with others on their own server as well as users on other server across the network once they sign up and pick a server. U sers on any server can block and report others to administrators if they choose to do so.

Mastodon is not governed by a central entity. No one server owner can impose their will or shut the network down, server owners can easily cut ties with any one server that embraces policies they view as too extreme. The added benefit of the design is that it reduces the cost of overhead and makes it impossible for a single entity to acquire.

The only full-time employee of the project is 25-year-old Rochko, who works at his home in Germany on a modest 2,400 per month. He purchased more powerful hardware to upgrade Mastodon's database server in order to keep up with the increase in demand.