The Mastodon instance was started in 2019. It had over 30,000 users by early November. People have signed up for mas.to and other instances in surging waves that have sometimes knocked them out of commission. The influx of users is caused by Musk's constant policy updates. Last week, the billionaire owner of the social media company suspended several high-profile journalists and accused them of dozing him, and then briefly banned links to any social media competitors. The mas.to instance hit 130,000 users and 67,000 active users by Tuesday.
That is small compared to the hundreds of millions of people who use the social networking site. MacLeary has a day job and no paid staff and has spent his time and money into mas.to as a labor of love. Mastodon is an open-sourced social media platform that is different from other big tech platforms. That appeal is part of Mastodon's appeal, and it's working its way from a niche into the mainstream.
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It's not yet known whether Mastodon will stay a nice, utopian "early Twitter" or become a ubiquitous, messy social network. Politicians, celebrities, and journalists are signing up to use it, and it is growing in its potential to mimic some of what is happening on the social networking site. As social groups make the move to the other app, Mastodon usernames can be found on many of the accounts on the micro-blogging site. There is a divide between new users who want Mastodon to be a platform on which to communicate and old users who want Mastodon to be something else.
With the growing number of users comes more responsibility for volunteer administrators, whose hobbies have become second jobs.
A lot of people don't realize what they're getting into. You have to run it like you own it. People don't understand how much it costs to run a platform like this.
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