Mastodon, a decentralised social media network, reported on Tuesday that it had surpassed 10 million registered users. “1,00,51,051 accounts; +1,742 in the last hour; +40,108 in the last day; +1,95,936 in the last week,” the website wrote in a tweet from its ‘Mastodon Users’ account. After Elon Musk acquired Twitter, a microblogging platform, in December of last year, the unregulated social media platform declared that it had over 2 million users. Between October and November of last year, Mastodon’s user base increased from 300K to 2.5 million, including journalists, politicians, authors, performers, and groups.

“At Mastodon, we believe that there doesn’t have to be a middleman between you and your audience and that journalists and government institutions especially should not have to rely on a private platform to reach the public,” the  platform had said.“Our free and open-source software enables anyone to run a social media platform entirely on their own infrastructure, entirely under their own control, while connecting to a global decentralised social network,” it added.

About Mastodon

Mastodon - Decentralized social media

Mastodon is a decentralized, open-source social media platform that was launched in 2016. It was created as an alternative to traditional social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook, with a focus on privacy, security, and community-building. Unlike traditional social media platforms, Mastodon is decentralized, which means that it does not have a single, central server. Instead, it operates on a federated model, with many different servers, or instances, that are connected to each other. Each instance has its own community and rules, but users on one instance can interact with users on other instances.

Mastodon is also known for its strong emphasis on privacy and security. For example, users can choose to make their profiles private, or only visible to approved followers. Mastodon also supports end-to-end encryption for direct messages and does not track user data or sell user information to advertisers. One of the unique features of Mastodon is its use of “toots” instead of tweets. Toots are essentially the same as tweets, but they can be up to 500 characters long, which is twice the length of a tweet.

Mastodon has gained a loyal following among those who are dissatisfied with traditional social media platforms and are looking for a more secure and community-focused alternative. However, its decentralized nature and lack of a central authority can also make it more challenging for new users to navigate and find the right instance to join.

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