Elon Musk’s
Twitter is seeing people flee like wartime Ukraine or draft-mandated Russia.
Media reports say nearly a million people may have quit the platform since the
world’s richest man acquired it on October 27 for $44 billion. As people look
to other platforms beyond Twitter, there is one that’s drawing more traction
than others – Mastodon.

Mastodon has
not been an incredibly popular platform until now. Out there since 2016,
Mastodon was founded by Eugen Rochko. Unlike the giants of social media,
Mastodon is a nonprofit.

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Mastodon
has gained 230,000 users since Musk bought Twitter on October 27, according to
Rochko who spoke to CNN.

Mastodon is
a unique social media platform, essentially because it’s both free-to-use and free
of ads. Text-heavy, conversational and news oriented, it follows a chronological
format instead of the algorithmic approach taken by Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.

But the
reason why Twitter users have found Mastodon a worthy replacement is because
the platform looks a lot like Twitter. It has a timeline of short updates.
Mastodon now has 655,000 active users every month, according to Rochko. “It is
not as large as Twitter, obviously, but it is the biggest that this network has
every seen,” the founder said.

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Mastodon,
named after the heavy metal band of the same name, was created as a project
rather than a monetizable platform, its creator said.

Christopher
Bouzy, the founder of Bot Sentinel, a platform that tracks bot accounts on
social media platforms, said: “We believe the uptick in (Twitter) deactivations
is a result of people upset with Elon Musk purchasing Twitter and deciding to
deactivate their accounts in protest.”

“There
seems to be indeed an attempt from many to migrate to other platforms, such as
Mastodon,” said Manoel Ribeiro, an academic at EPFL Lausanne in Switzerland
where he studies niche internet communities including the alt-right.