Freedom never comes free. In the case of Twitter, the price was $44 billion, which Elon Musk will pay to free the platform from its responsibilities as a publicly traded company and transform it into a free-speech Xanadu. Musk wants to open source the platform’s algorithms, ban spam bots and allow people to tweet what they want “within the bounds of the law”. For him, the stakes are downright existential. “My strong intuition,” he said in an interview at TED last week, “is that having a public platform that is maximally trusted and broadly inclusive is extremely important for the future of civilization.”
Musk’s vision has led to uncertainty about what Twitter’s future might look like. But many of those ideas are already at work on another social network, one that thousands of people have flocked to in recent days: Mastodon.
Mastodon emerged in 2016 as a decentralized alternative to Twitter. It’s not one website, but a collection of federated communities called “agencies.” The code is open source, allowing anyone to create their own “copy”. There is metalhead.club, for German metalheads, and koyu.space, a “nice community for chill people”. Each instance has its own server and creates its own set of rules. There are no broad edicts about what people can and cannot say in the “fediverse” or the “federal universe.” On Mastodon, communities control themselves.
According to the network’s creator, Eugen Rochko, more than 28,000 new users joined a Mastodon server on Monday. Since March, when Musk first started making noise, the network has seen a whopping 49,000 new accounts. For a service with 360,000 monthly active users, that is a significant influx. “On the Mastodon server I manage, logins have increased by 71 percent and the number of monthly active users has increased by 36 percent,” Rochko said by email. “A lot of people have gone back to their old accounts after the news.”
Rochko was once in a position similar to Musk’s: He was a powerful Twitter user with some complaints. The problem, as Rocheko saw it, was centralization. A central authority meant that the platform would bend to the whims of its shareholders and that rules could change without warning. It also meant that a platform could go defunct, something Rochko had experienced with MySpace, Friendfeed and SchülerVZ, a German version of Facebook. A server owned and controlled by the people using it would give more control, including over their self-government.
Unlike Musk, Rocheko didn’t have billions to burn. Instead, he was a 24-year-old student, months away from graduating from a university in central Germany. So Rocheko decided to build his own social network. He created the framework for Mastodon in his spare time, accepting donations from Patreon benefactors, who were similarly interested in a Twitter alternative that returned power to the people. In 2016, shortly after graduating, he launched Mastodon to the masses.
