Mastodon is considered the top Twitter alternative

Dec 20, 2022 16:45 GMT  ·  By

The Twitter controversy continues, this time with an official post coming from none other than Mastodon, the service that’s currently considered one of the biggest competitors.

In a post on the official site, Mastodon reveals that Twitter has recently banned its @joinmastodon account on the platform, simply because it shared a link to a recently created Mastodon account.

This account, Mastodon says, was called @ElonJet, and its purpose was rather intriguing: to broadcast the public flight path of Elon Musk’s private jet.

But Mastodon says that Twitter’s actions against its number one competitor didn’t stop there.

“We also started receiving reports that users were unable to tweet links to any Mastodon servers, including ones completely unrelated to the @ElonJet account, encountering an error message claiming that the links were identified as “potentially harmful”, among them George Takei, making it more difficult for people to share their Mastodon profiles,” Mastodon explained.

Needless to say, Mastodon used this occasion to brag about its own platform, explaining that this is a place where users are in full control of their accounts.

As a result, Mastodon says, its number of users skyrocketed in the last few weeks, primarily because more and more people decided to leave Twitter due to all the controversy surrounding the recent takeover by Elon Musk.

“Mastodon has recently exploded in popularity, jumping from approx. 300K monthly active users to 2.5M between the months of October and November, with more and more journalists, political figures, writers, actors and organizations moving over. Understanding that freedom of the press is absolutely essential for a functional democracy, we are excited to see Mastodon grow and become a household name in newsrooms across the world, and we are committed to continuing to improve our software to face up to new challenges that come with rapid growth and increasing demand,” Mastodon explained in its post.