social media
Few people know Twitter alternative Mastodon
The Twitter and Mastodon apps on two smartphones placed side by side. Tech billionaire Musk has completed the $44 billion purchase of short messaging service Twitter. photo
© Andre M. Chang/ZUMA Press Wire/dpa
Since Elon Musk took over Twitter, many users have been discussing switching to other social media services. The name of the network Mastodon keeps coming up.
The Twitter competitor Mastodon is so far only a few people in Germany. According to a representative survey by the market research institute Yougov published on Monday, 80 percent of people in Germany have never heard of this decentralized and advertising-free network. Eleven percent have heard of it before, but don’t have an account there. Another four percent are already active with an account at Mastodon. Five percent did not provide any information.
Months ago, plans for the takeover of Twitter by the controversial US entrepreneur Elon Musk – as was the case when Facebook bought WhatsApp – gave rise to discussions about alternatives. However, several attempts in the past to set up a comprehensive Twitter alternative have failed. For example, App.net – intended as a kind of Twitter with subscription fees – was discontinued in 2017 after five years. At WhatsApp, despite all the excitement, there was no major exodus of users.
Small versus big
The micro-blogging service Mastodon, developed in Germany in 2016, has 5.7 million accounts to date. According to the latest figures, Twitter had 217 million daily active users in the company’s own apps or the web version at the end of 2021. For some time now, the service has only published the number of users who see ads on the platform.
Unlike Twitter, Mastodon is not a uniform service, but consists of a decentralized network of different servers (currently around 3800 “instances”). As a Mastodon user, you can communicate with members of all other communities. However, the house rules are quite different on the different instances.
Instead of tweets like on Twitter, one speaks of “Toots” or translated as “Tröts”. Similar to Twitter, the length of a post is limited. The “Tröts” can be commented on, shared and favored by users.
User statistics Mastodon