Coinspeaker
As Twitter Limits Tweet Views, Its Rival Mastodon Sees Strong Jump in User Base
Over the last weekend, Twitter chief Elon Musk took the decision to limit the daily tweet views of individual users to address “extreme levels of data scraping” and “system manipulation”. It seems that this decision from Musk has rather helped competitors to expand their market share. Soon after Twitter introduced this limit, rival company Mastodon reported a significant surge in traffic. On Sunday, July 2, Mastodon creator and CEO Eugen Rochko said that the platform’s active user base surged by at least 110,000.
Based out of Germany, Mastodon is rival to Twitter offering a similar tweet-like structure. However, it’s completely decentralized and user-driven. Unlike Twitter, which is controlled by one entity, Mastodon runs over a network of thousands of dispersed computer servers that are primarily administered by volunteers.
Rochko expressed gratitude to the Mastodon team for their assistance with the infrastructure, even though it was a Sunday. He also shared messages from loyal users and Mastodon developers. In one post advising the new users, Rochko wrote:
“Follow as many people and hashtags as you can. This is not Twitter; there is no algorithm, and it is not going to fill your feed with stuff it thinks you like. You have to curate it yourself.”
Courtney Heard, a user on Mastodon, concluded the post by stating that after curating their feed, the experience on Mastodon is more lively and fulfilling compared to Twitter over the past year. As of now, Mastodon has reported a total of 324,000 active users.
Twitter Faces Growing Competition
Twitter is facing increasing competition in the market as Instagram is all set to pitch its product rivaling Twitter this Thursday, July 6. Dubbed Threads, the product from Meta will rival Twitter through similar text-based posts that can be liked, commented on, and shared.
Users on Threads can have the same username as that on Instagram and follow the same accounts. With this launch, Meta aims to capitalize on the problems faced by Twitter since it was taken over by Elon Musk last year. Users have become frustrated with Twitter due to issues like relaxed content moderation policies, mandatory monthly subscription fees for authentication, and site reliability problems.
While there are other platforms like Mastodon and Bluesky that compete with Twitter, they are still in the early stages and haven’t established themselves as strong alternatives. Instagram, on the other hand, has been promoting its upcoming app with celebrities and influencers for months, hoping to create excitement when it becomes available.
The Threads app is currently available for “pre-order” on the App Store listing. The description shows Threads as “where communities come together to discuss everything from the topics you care about today, to what’ll be trending tomorrow.”
As Twitter Limits Tweet Views, Its Rival Mastodon Sees Strong Jump in User Base
