Reading 2 minutes Views 5 Published Updated
The day after Twitter’s new limits on the number of messages users can see according to their verification status, social media rival Mastodon reported a significant increase in traffic.
According to the creator and CEO of Mastodon Evgeny Rochko, on July 2, the number of active users of the platform increased by at least 110,000 people.
Mastodon is a German competitor to Twitter with a tweet-like structure, although it emphasizes that the platform is user-driven and decentralized. Unlike Twitter, which is centralized and controlled by a single organization, Mastodon operates through a network of thousands of disparate computer servers.
Rochco, who is mostly run by volunteer administrators who are merging their systems, also posted a message thanking team members for “coming to help with the infrastructure despite Sunday.”
The platform’s CEO also posted various posts from longtime users and developers of Mastodon, including one post that offered advice to new users of the platform:
“…follow as many people and hashtags as possible. It’s not Twitter; there’s no algorithm, and it’s not going to fill your feed with things it thinks you like. You have to manage it yourself.”
The user, whose name is Courtney Hurd, ended the post by saying that when users curate their own feed, “it becomes much more colorful and useful than Twitter during the year.” As of this writing, Mastodon’s server status has reported 324,000 active users.
On the subject: Fake news created by artificial intelligence sparked rumors about the resignation of Gary Gensler
The surge in activity on Mastodon came after Elon Musk, owner and former CEO of Twitter, announced that the platform would introduce new limits on the number of messages accounts can read per day.
Under Musk’s new rules, Twitter users with verified accounts will be allowed to view 10,000 messages per day, while new and unverified accounts will receive 500 under the new limits.
Musk didn’t give a specific reason for the new restrictions, though he tweeted that the platform “has so plundered data that it has degraded the quality of service for regular users.”
Recent data has also revealed an alarming number of fake accounts in many Twitter communities.