Thousands fled to Mastodon after Musk bought Twitter. Are they still ‘tooting’?

When Elon Musk bought Twitter nearly six months ago, bringing back white supremacists and booting journalists who had criticized him, many users felt it was the right time to leave the platform.

Thousands of tweeters - myself included - fled to Mastodon: a scrappy social media project designed from its start in 2016 to be resistant against takeovers by billionaires. Mastodon is decentralized: instead of a single website, it's a network of thousands of independently run servers - each with their own moderators and users - who can interact with each other's posts, called "toots", using an open protocol called ActivityPub. Other social media services can connect to ActivityPub as well, so no one app can monopolize the broader network that Mastodon is part of, called the "fediverse".

All that posed a bit of a learning curve. In addition to learning the new terms, I had to carefully choose a server, which would determine who would be in charge of my data, and what toots I would see most often.

Mastodon's creator, a German programmer named Eugen Rochko, told me at the time that his creation could be "slightly more difficult to grasp" than Twitter. "But we're not trying to be an exact copy," he said. "We're trying to make something better."

Musk has appeared threatened at times. In December, he banned links to Mastodon on Twitter and suspended users who posted their Mastodon handles, including Mastodon's official account. Days later, he suddenly reversed course, calling the ban a "mistake" during a Twitter Spaces livestream. "Fucking post Mastodon all goddamn day long, I don't care," he said.

Nearly half a year later, has Mastodon seized the momentum? Data shows that it saw a huge surge of interest late last year: its monthly active users increased more than eightfold to a high of 2.6 million about a month after Musk's Twitter purchase. But that number has since dropped to just 1.2 million - a sign that Mastodon remains far from the levels of hype that would threaten a behemoth like Twitter.

"It's definitely the case that it's slowed down," says Nathan Schneider, a University of Colorado Boulder professor who researches collective ownership models and runs a small Mastodon server called social.coop. "I think a lot of people came and found it a little hard. Using Mastodon can feel like eating your vegetables."