It should be easier for Twitter refugees to start using Mastodon, and there will be fewer Twitter features missing on the distributed microblogging service due to the changes. The announcement was made Monday by the German nonprofit that developed the open-source code for Mastodon.
“We know that deciding which Mastodon service provider to start your experience with can be confusing,” said founder and CEO Eugen Rochko. “For many, this is a new concept because traditionally the platform and the service provider are one and the same.
So instead of presenting a long list of servers and telling newcomers to pick one of the thousands before creating an account, the joinmastodon.org website will direct new users to the Mastodon social server run by the same company.
Rochko’s Monday post described this new default as being available “now,” but as of Tuesday afternoon, the site still showed the usual list of servers.
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In that post, he also said that Mastodon would mandate equivalence of Twitter’s quoted tweets and search features. These tools are still not officially supported (back in 2018, Rochko posted that the citation feature “inevitably adds toxicity to people’s behavior”), although some third-party Mastodon apps support citation publishing.
“We’ve been listening to the community, and we’re excited to bring you some of our most popular features, such as quote posts, improved content and profile search, and groups,” he wrote. “We’re also constantly working on improving content and profile discovery, onboarding, and of course our extensive moderation toolset, and removing friction from decentralized features.”
The addition of these features comes just a few weeks after another decentralized Twitter alternative became available in limited availability , called Blue Sky., developed by a company spun out of Twitter that was launched in 2019 by former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey.
Bluesky is built on top of open syndication protocols like Mastodon, but it looks and feels more like Twitter, including support for quoted posts and full-text search. Some of Twitter’s most prominent users, like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.-NY.), have appeared on Bluesky.
Mastodon, however, is still much bigger than Blue Sky, which is still only inviting. Rochko’s post notes that Mastodon is “just over a billion posts per month,” while a third-party automated count of Mastodon accounts now shows the network has surpassed 11 million users .
Meanwhile, Twitter reported 820.22 million “daily monetizable users” in the mid-237 years it last filed as a public company. After Elon Musk took over Twitter on March 28 , he tweeted that his new fortune had reached 25.94 billion “daily active users,” but no new numbers appear to have been shared since.
It’s unclear what effect Musk’s chaotic management of Twitter has had on user engagement, but Musk’s efforts to extract revenue from previously free features have apparently driven away many business users.
One of the biggest to date announced its exit on Saturday. Automattic, the developer of the WordPress content management system used by an estimated 43% of websites worldwide, said it will drop support for automatically sharing new posts on Twitter starting Monday. (I publish my own blog on Automattic WordPress.com , but don’t have Twitter autoshare enabled.
The San Francisco company cites the same reason that led New York’s MTA to stop providing real-time service alerts on Twitter : the sharp increase in the cost of using its API . “The cost increase is prohibitive for us, and without passing a significant price increase on to you, we don’t see that as an option,” .
WordPress users will have additional sharing options in the near future, the post continued: “We’ll be adding Instagram and Mastodon soon.
