Mastodon hits over 2mn users after Musk's Twitter takeover

SAN FRANCISCO: Decentralised social media platform Mastodon has reached over 2 million subscribers after Elon Musk took over the micro-blogging platform Twitter.

Mastodon has jumped from approximately 300K monthly active users to 2.5 mn, which includes journalists, political figures, writers, actors and organisations, between October and November, it said in a blogpost on Monday.

On December 16, Twitter suspended Mastodon's @joinmastodon account after it shared a link to the newly-registered Mastodon account of @ElonJet, an account that broadcasts public flight path data of Elon Musk's private jet, which was previously suspended from the micro-blogging platform itself.

The social media platform also received reports that users were unable to tweet links to any Mastodon servers, including ones completely unrelated to the @ElonJet account, showing an error message which claims that the links were identified as "potentially harmful".

"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," the social media platform said.

"Our free and open-source software enables anyone to run a social media platform entirely on their own infrastructure, entirely under their own control, while connecting to a global decentralised social network," it added.