Rochko says he was too busy working on Mastodon this week to comment on the overloaded servers and how the sheer amount of new users affected the network. The Mastodon founder posted that he changed parts of how people sign up for new servers, allowing new users to filter by region, sign-up speed, and type. On November 8, he said he had fixed delayed feeds on two of the larger servers.
Downtime on the decentralized network is not a new problem. Raman’s research looked at downtime on Mastodon in 2019 and found that servers were inaccessible about 10 percent of the time. It’s a frustration reminiscent of Twitter’s failed whale days. But even in the early days of Twitter, Raman says, it only went offline about 1.25 percent of the time.
Some of these growing pains come from users who expect Mastodon to work with the same ease as products funded by Big Tech companies, but the nature of a volunteer-powered network means Mastodon can’t respond to crises like it does.
“People are trained not to be patient. We expect to drop by, sign up, and we’re on board,” said Robert Gehl, a professor of communications and media studies at York University in Canada who studied Mastodon. “This is a little more complicated. But in the long run, for people interested in a more community-oriented space, I think it’s very rewarding.”
Part of Mastodon’s appeal is hosting smaller communities, where moderators have rules and can regulate hate speech better than on some larger platforms. But with larger servers overwhelmed, people are applying and flooding smaller ones, reshaping the communities that have grown there. Still, Stone and co-founder Kev Quirk say they’re excited about the diversity of opinions and topics that come up in the conversations.
Fosstodon has increased its traffic tenfold since late October, Quirk says, and managing it has become a second full-time job in the past week. It even saw increased interest in April, when news of Musk’s deal to buy Twitter first broke. “That almost brought us to our knees,” Quirk says. “It’s nothing compared to this.”
Jerry Bell, who runs the security-focused infosec.exchange on Mastodon, says his server saw challenges this weekend as the number of users grew from about 180 active users to about 8,000. On Monday, Bell posted a toot looking for volunteers to help him with security, support and moderation at the agency.
“This has been a really big battle because a lot of people do this as a hobby,” Bell says. “The pace at which things were changing forced a lot of people to figure out how to react very quickly.”
But Bell says the new users have also ushered in more substantive discussions about his copy. The small community was not always the most active. He has already seen that change as more people from the security world join in. And, Bell says, the volunteers who want to help are already pouring in.
Mastodon’s meltdown may be short-lived. But that largely depends on, say, runners expanding their efforts to host more users, and users having the patience to navigate the network. The decentralized social media model isn’t exactly new, it’s more of a return to the old internet. And for some, that’s a welcome change.
“What’s happening now is making people rethink social media,” Gehl says. Mastodon “is kind of designed to adapt because it’s made up of all these different servers,” he says. “It just takes some time to shake out.”
Will Knight contributed to this report.
