Tusk Vs Musk

Tom Ough asks if Mastodon really is a threat to Twitter

- Tom Ough

Social media, more than almost any other corner of business, is a winner-takes-all endeavour. We gravitate towards whichever platform has the most users. We bring more friends with us. Monopolies arise, and pretenders are crushed. The history of social media is littered with corpses; it is an elephant's graveyard.

Enter Mastodon, inauspiciously named for the extinct elephantine mammal. Like Twitter, Mastodon is a microblogging site, and as such, Twitter users will find many aspects of Mastodon familiar. In the place of tweets, for instance, we have "toots". An apter term there could hardly be for a brief emission of hot air.

There has been a surge of interest in Mastodon. Eugen Rochko, its founder, CEO and sole full-time employee, reports that the site has surpassed 1 million daily active users. Independent analysis tells the same story. Mastodon is on the rise, and it's all happened since Elon Musk took over Twitter.

The world's richest man has owned Twitter for little more than a fortnight. In that time, he has laid off around half of the company's 7,500 workers and begun a chaotic overhauling of the blue-tick system that currently divides users into, as he put it, "peasants and lords". Twitter's content moderation will also be overhauled, Musk has said. "One thing is for sure," he tweeted last week, "it isn't boring!"

It hasn't been boring, but it's been a bit much for some users. These are the ones who find Musk exasperating, have gone to Mastodon rather than pay him £8 a month for the ambiguous subscription service Twitter Blue, and have come back to Twitter to tweet about it. How representative are these Disgusteds of Twitter dot com? I put the question to Axel Bruns, an Australian media professor.