Rodti MacLeary started a Mastodon example, mas. to, in 2019. At the beginning of November 2022, it had around 35,000 users. But Since Elon Musk bought Twitter and unleashed one chaotic decision after anotherpeople signed up for mas.to and other instances, or servers, in surging waves that sometimes knocked them over briefly offline. User influence is propelled by every random policy update Musk professes from his own Twitter account. Last week, the billionaire owner of Twitter suspended several high-profile journalists accused him of doxing him, then briefly banned links to all social media competitors, including Mastodon. But the mas.to instance continued to grow, reaching 130,000 total users and 67,000 active users on Tuesday.
That’s tiny compared to the hundreds of millions of Twitter tweeters. But it’s a heavy burden for someone like MacLeary, who has a day job and no paid staff, and who has invested time and money into mas.to as a labor of love. As a decentralized and open-source social media platform, Mastodon is markedly different in its construction from big tech platforms like Meta, Twitter, and YouTube. That’s part of its appeal, and it’s working its way from a niche into mainstream consciousness: Mastodon now has over 9,000 instances and some nearly 2.5 million active monthly users.
“There’s definitely momentum behind it all,” MacLeary says. “I don’t know if that momentum pushed it over the tipping point. It reminds me of my early experience on Twitter, which was very positive. You felt like you knew everyone there.
Whether Mastodon remains a nice, utopian “early Twitterer” or becomes a messy, ubiquitous social network remains to be seen. But it’s increasingly likely to replicate some of what Twitter does, with The politicians, celebrities and journalists register. Twitter profiles now often carry Mastodon usernames as social groups switch to the other app. But there’s a schism: some new users want Mastodon to be Twitter, and some Mastodon users are there because they’re on Twitter.
And with this growing number of users comes more responsibility, not just for Mastodon itself, but for the volunteer admins, whose hobbies of managing servers have become side jobs.
“There are a lot of people who really don’t realize what they’re getting into,” says Corey Silverstein, an internet lawyer. “If you run these [instances], you should run it as if you own Twitter. What people don’t understand is how complicated it is to run a platform like this and how expensive it is. »
Because Mastodon is decentralized, it relies on various server administrators instead of a central hub to stay online. These admins aren’t just glorified users; they themselves become Internet service providers, says Silverstein, and therefore responsible for ensuring that their servers comply with copyright and privacy laws. If they fail, they could be subject to prosecution. And they have to follow complex legal frameworks around the world.
In the United States only, there is the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which makes social platforms liable for copyrighted material posted there if they don’t register to protect themselves and work to remove it (registration only takes a few minutes and costs $6 ). There is also the Children’s Online Privacy Shield Rule, which dictates how platforms handle children’s data. If administrators become aware of child exploitation material, they must report it to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. Then there is Europe, with its General Data Protection Regulation, a privacy and human rights law. The new Europe Digital Services Act This could also apply to Mastodon servers, if they get big enough. And administrators must comply not only with their local laws, but also with the laws that exist wherever their server is accessible. All of this is daunting, experts say, but not impossible.
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