Rodti MacLeary started a Mastodon instance, mas.to, in 2019. By early November 2022, it had accumulated about 35,000 users. But ever since Elon Musk bought Twitter and let loose one chaotic decision after another, people have signed up for mas.to and other instances or servers, in rising waves that have sometimes kicked them offline for a while. The influx of users is propelled by every haphazard policy update Musk proclaims from his own Twitter account. Last week, the billionaire owner of Twitter suspended several high-profile journalists, accusing them of doxing him, then briefly banned links to competitors on social media, including Mastodon. But the mas.to instance continued to grow, reaching a total of 130,000 users and 67,000 active users on Tuesday.
That’s minuscule compared to Twitter’s hundreds of millions of tweeters. But it’s a tough call for someone like MacLeary, who has a day job and no paid staff, and has invested time and money into mas.to as a labor of love. As a decentralized, open-source social media platform, Mastodon is distinctly different in construction from Big Tech platforms such as Meta, Twitter, and YouTube. That’s part of its appeal, and it’s working its way from niche to mainstream consciousness: Mastodon now has over 9,000 instances and nearly 2.5 million active monthly users.
“There’s definitely momentum behind it,” says MacLeary. “Whether that momentum has passed the tipping point, I don’t know. It reminds me of my experience in the early days of Twitter, which was very positive. You felt like you knew everyone there.”
Whether Mastodon remains a fun, utopian “early Twitter” or becomes a ubiquitous, messy social network remains to be seen. But it’s growing in its potential to replicate some of what Twitter does, with politicians, celebrities and journalists signing up. Twitter profiles now often carry Mastodon usernames as social groups make the switch to the other app. But there’s a schism: some new users want Mastodon to become Twitter, and some Mastodon users are there because they use Twitter.
And with that growing number of users comes more responsibility – not just for Mastodon itself, but also for volunteer administrators, whose hobbies have turned running servers into a second job.
“There are a lot of people who really don’t realize what they’re getting into,” said Corey Silverstein, a lawyer who specializes in internet law. ‘If you use this one [instances], you should run it as if you own Twitter. What people don’t understand is how complicated it is to run such a platform and how expensive it is.”
Because Mastodon is decentralized, it relies on several server administrators rather than one central hub to stay online. These admins aren’t just glorified users; they become more like Internet service providers themselves, says Silverstein, and therefore responsible for keeping their servers compliant with copyright and privacy laws. If they fail, they could be on the hook for lawsuits. And they must follow complex legal frameworks around the world.
In the US alone, there’s the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which makes social platforms liable for copyrighted material posted there if they don’t register to protect themselves and try to take it down (registering only takes a few minutes and costs $6). There is also the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Rule, which governs 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. Europe’s new Digital Service Act could also apply to Mastodon servers, if they grow big enough. And administrators must comply not only with their local laws, but also with laws that apply wherever their server is accessible. That’s all daunting, experts say, but not impossible.
