TechCrunch: How Mastodon is scaling amid the Twitter exodus

[highplainsdem]

https://techcrunch.com/2022/12/23/how-mastodon-is-scaling-amid-the-twitter-exodus/

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Eugen Rochko, Mastodon’s creator — and currently sole full-time employee — said in an interview with TechCrunch that the service has ratcheted up numbers very fast, and it now has 2.5 million monthly active users across no less than 8,600 different servers. Mastodon operates a couple of these directly, and the biggest of them, mastodon.social, has 881,000 registered users, 210,000 of them active.

Rochko has closed Mastodon’s servers for new signups. It’s a move he described as a “victimless decision,” because there are so many other places to register an account and still interact with the wider Mastodon universe. Nonetheless, the move has created a curious scarcity/demand situation: People and organizations have contacted Rochko asking for access to getting accounts on his servers anyway.

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Mastodon as it currently exists is set up as a not-for-profit organization, financed for the most part by a Patreon account that Rochko set up that currently brings in $31,000 each month — a figure that he says “has risen dramatically over the past month… from $7,000.”

Mastodon is going to remain not-for-profit, Rochko said, but it’s looking at what he describes as a split model, “like Mozilla’s, where the nonprofit will continue working on the core product, which will remain open source, nonprofit and so on, and we might start a for-profit side business for software as a service, first to provide hosting for Mastodon’s for those who desire that.”

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Much more at the link.

[Hermit-The-Prog]

1. The design scales because anyone can run an instance.

[Hekate]

2. All the best to the Mastodon!