Skip to main content

Mastodon surpasses 1 million monthly active users as Twitter backlash worsens

Mastodon, an alternative to Twitter that’s been getting a lot of attention lately, just surpassed 1 million monthly active users this week, all while Twitter struggles to deal with the  backlash caused by recently announced changes to its platform.

On Monday, Eugen Rochko, founder and CEO of Mastodon, announced via a Mastodon post that the social media platform now has “1,028,362 monthly active users across the network today.” This news comes after a particularly tumultuous week (and weekend) for Twitter after Elon Musk took over the popular microblogging platform just last month.

Musk’s first week at the helm of Twitter saw leadership shake-ups, a massive layoff, and a pretty sizable backlash to some of the changes he announced, including charging users $8 per month for a blue check. And then the drama snowballed, as it often does on Twitter, but this time it apparently resulted in further policy changes to the platform that were then announced by Musk himself:

Going forward, any Twitter handles engaging in impersonation without clearly specifying “parody” will be permanently suspended

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 6, 2022

For context, around the same time Musk tweeted the above announcement, there were quite a few Twitter users who changed their account names to “Elon Musk” as a way to protest and poke fun at Twitter’s latest move to charge a fee for a blue check verification badge. Some of these users included celebrities such as actresses Kathy Griffin and Valerie Bertinelli.

But in the midst of all the drama leading up to and now during Twitter’s takeover by Musk, Mastodon, a six-year-old social media platform that was essentially born out of its founder’s dissatisfaction with Twitter, has apparently experienced substantial growth. In fact, Rochko noted in a blog post published not long after Musk first announced his intention to buy Twitter that Mastodon was experiencing an increase in new users as early as April 2022, and he seemed to attribute that growth to social media users seeking an alternative to Twitter once news broke that Musk wanted to buy it.

And exceeding 1 million monthly active users was not the only indicator of Mastodon’s growth. Rochko also mentioned in today’s Mastodon post that the platform now has 489,003 new users and that there are “1,124 new Mastodon servers since October 27.” That date is notable because it’s when Musk took charge of Twitter.

Anita George
Anita has been a technology reporter since 2013 and currently writes for the Computing section at Digital Trends. She began…
Twitter’s SMS two-factor authentication is having issues. Here’s how to switch methods
A person's hands holding a smartphone as they browse Twitter on it.

It might be a good idea to review and change your two-factor authentication options for Twitter. Elon Musk's Twitter has another issue for its users to worry about.

Twitter has reportedly been having issues with its SMS two-factor authentication feature (2FA). According to Wired, beginning as early as this past weekend, some Twitter users have reported difficulties logging in to their Twitter accounts due to the app's SMS 2FA feature not working properly. Essentially, the feature relies on the app sending users an authentication code via text message, which they can then enter as a second step in the login process.

Read more
Twitter has reportedly suspended signups for Twitter Blue
Twitter Blue menu option on a white screen background which is on a black background.

The start of Elon Musk's tenure as owner of Twitter has not been without its struggles and chaos. And so far, the chaos Twitter currently finds itself in shows no signs of letting up anytime soon.

So it seems fitting that the latest news on the Twitter front is that signups for the microblogging platform's $8-per-month Twitter Blue subscription have reportedly been suspended. On Friday, Forbes reported that new signups for Twitter's newly revamped Blue subscription have apparently been disabled, having "verified that users have not been able to sign up to the service for more than an hour," and also citing that the option to sign up for Blue on the iOS app had disappeared as further proof of the suspension. The Verge also noted that some users may still see the option to subscribe, only to then be met with an error message. One of the editors at Digital Trends said the option to sign up for the service is just missing from his iOS app's menu, noted that it had been like that "since at least 8 p.m. PT last night," and shared the following screenshot:

Read more
Twitter begins rollout of new gray check marks only to abruptly remove them
Elon Musk.

In the middle of writing an article about Twitter's initial rollout of a new gray check mark verification badge, we noticed something odd: Twitter accounts that had the new gray check marks only minutes earlier were suddenly without them again. So what happened?

Elon Musk apparently happened. Mere hours after his newly purchased social media platform began its rollout of a new gray check mark in an effort to help clarify which high-profile accounts were actually verified, the new gray check marks began disappearing from various accounts, evidently at Musk's behest. Just take a look at this tweet conversation between web video producer Marques Brownlee and Musk:

Read more