It is becoming increasingly clear that if there is one system to replace Twitter in the next few years, it will be Mastodon (including other platforms capable of integrating into the Mastodon fedivers). So how is it going ?
It’s still very early in the game, so we can’t be very specific on the details. Clearly there is a lot of movement towards Mastodon. But what we haven’t seen yet is a flood of “celebrity” accounts that have massive followings on Twitter. With each passing day, people with big Twitter followings show up on Mastodon, but we’re not close to a turning point just yet. Most “high subscribers” have created Mastodon accounts but are not actively posting.
What is a user?
It’s a chicken and egg story. With 3-8 million (depending on how many you prefer) active users, Mastodon doesn’t have a critical mass of users to attract the big players. However, in the next 90 days, I expect many big names to post on Twitter and Mastodon. In other cases, there will be bots that replicate Twitter posts on the Mastodon network. These are all small steps in the migration. It will seem to move slowly until that critical mass is reached, and then you’ll see things flip 180 degrees where Mastodon is the main presence. It may take 12-18 months or even longer, but when critical mass is reached, it will change quickly.
Here is an article that seems very knowledgeable about the user base. It’s been almost a month, which is an eternity in this space, but it was updated more recently. absolutelymaybe.plos.org/…
Highlights to note.
- The “user” statistics on all of these systems are suspect. Remember, Musk claimed that a lot of Twitter was bot traffic. Beyond that, there are many inactive accounts on Twitter, just as there are many new “placeholder” accounts on Mastodon that haven’t been used yet.
- Mastodon’s architecture has thousands of instances and some users have multiple accounts, which exaggerates the numbers.
- Beware of the “active users” statistic. There is no consistent definition for this.
- The article makes a very important point about “off-grid” Mastodon instances. The code is open source, so if you want, you can set up a private social network. That’s exactly what Social Truth did, although Trump lied about it until he was exposed. These numbers should not be counted because these users will not be using the system as Twitter always has been.
That said, there’s no doubt that Mastodon is growing very quickly – and some of the more popular instances have had waitlists for months as they add resources to support their local user load. Mastodon recently surpassed the half-billion daily posts mark. It’s still a lot smaller than Twitter, but half a billion posts a day is pretty darn impressive. According to most reports, the number of active users grew by around 10x in 2020.
And again, that’s without a lot of personalities and organizations that people would like to follow. Nevertheless, there are many Mastodon accounts that now have hundreds of thousands of followers. For example, Robert Reich has 199,000 subscribers. George Takei has 324,000 subscribers. It is happening and evolving rapidly. Imagine how that will develop once Barack Obama, Taylor Swift, Ellen Degeneres, LeBron James and Oprah Winfrey become active on Mastodon, and they will.
How much does it cost?
Today, most instances of Mastodon offer accounts for free. And most don’t have ads yet. Mastodon does not have algorithms that promote products or views that they can sell to the highest bidder. So how can this be sustainable?
Well, that’s probably not sustainable in a totally free model. However, it is important to understand that a person can run a Mastodon instance without spending a lot of money, which begs the question of how Devin Nunes was able to generate over half a million dollars in unpaid bills on his Trump account.
Here’s an article from a guy who set up a server on Amazon’s AWS and is spending less than $100/month: www.micahwalter.com/…Now, if his server takes off with hundreds of thousands (or millions) of accounts, he’ll probably be spending several hundred dollars a month, but with a large user base, that amount would be easy to cover based on a donation.
And after?
We have to see Musk fail miserably and bring Twitter down to Parler and other hate speech sites. The infrastructure is advancing rapidly. The main hurdle now is the chicken and egg thing. We need to push the people we follow to start posting on Mastodon so that new users find a rich ecosystem when they arrive.
PS
Hate group sites (Parler, Truth Social and others) all seem to be in rapid decline. Reports indicate that Truth Social’s active user rate has dropped to half of its peak and continues to decline. DWAC (Digital World Acquisition Corporation, the SPAC entity that was supposed to acquire Truth Social is one of Trump’s scams) is now trading at $17, which is barely above liquidation value. Clearly the site is headed for the dumpster. In this case, SPAC was created with many promises from investors, but most of the money never made it to the table and never will. Let’s hope Trump never sees a penny of this scam. And if it was Nunes, I would check my bank account to see how late the paychecks are.
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