According to the founder and CEO of Mastodon, the userbase has increased massively since Musk’s Twitter buyout. In fact, Eugen Rochko – who also serves as lead developer of the app – says the number of monthly active users increased from 300,000 to 2.5 million from October to November. The information comes a week after Mastodon’s Twitter account was suspended, along with the accounts of other journalists. Twitter imposed a ban after a Mastodon account (@ElonJet) started broadcasting the public flight data of Musk’s private jet. “This is a stark reminder that centralized platforms can impose arbitrary and unfair limits on what you can and can’t say while holding your social graph hostage,” Rochko says. “At Mastodon, we believe that there doesn’t have to be a middleman between you and your audience and that journalists and government institutions especially should not have to rely on a private platform to reach the public.”
Free and Open
Rochko points out that the decentralized Mastodon offers a free and open-source platform that allows all users to run their accounts under their control. “Not only does this allow organizations like the German government or the European Commission to run their own Mastodon servers where they publish important information that gets distributed to thousands of their followers across many different Mastodon servers, but it also gives you the freedom to choose a social media provider the same way you would choose a telephone, internet, or e-mail provider, and to move from one to the other while retaining your followers.” “Understanding that freedom of the press is absolutely essential for a functional democracy, we are excited to see Mastodon grow and become a household name in newsrooms across the world.” Tip of the day: After years of hefting a laptop around, you inevitably build up a menagerie of Wi-Fi networks. For the most part, they’ll sit on your PC, hardly used, but at times a change in configuration can make it difficult to connect to a network your computer already remembers. At this point, it can be beneficial to make Windows forget a Wi-Fi network and delete its network profile.
