Twitter’s abrupt decision to limit the number of tweets users can see on a daily basis has been a boon for rival platform Mastodon.
The decentralized social network saw its active users grow by 294,000 over the weekend, according to Mastodon founder Eugen Rochko. “And posting activity roughly tripled. Lots of new sign-ups, but also many returning users. Fun times!” he wrote in a post.
In an email to PCMag, Rochko also pointed to a Mastodon API, which shows the social network's active users climbed from 1.27 million on July 1 to 1.7 million as of today.
The surge comes after Twitter owner Elon Musk announced on Saturday that the company would limit tweet viewing, citing the threat of “extreme levels of data scraping and system manipulation.” As a result, unverified Twitter users were briefly restricted to only seeing 600 posts per day, which was later increased to 1,000.
Twitter has since said the “rate limits” currently only affect a small percentage of users, such as suspected bots and other bad actors. “Any advance notice on these actions would have allowed bad actors to alter their behavior to evade detection,” the company wrote in a Tuesday blog post.
Nevertheless, the move seems to have prompted a renewed interest in Mastodon, which has seen significant growth since Musk acquired Twitter last year.
According to third-party trackers, Mastodon currently has around 12 to 13 million users across the decentralized social network. Fediverse Observe concurs that Mastodon saw an increase of over 438,000 monthly active users during the long July 4th weekend for a total of 2 million.
Meanwhile, another tracker, Mastodon Users, confirmed it saw a spike in new users starting on July 1, the day Twitter began imposing the rate limits.
Despite the growth, there’s an ongoing debate over whether Mastodon can grow enough to beat Twitter, which had 238 million monetizable daily active users last year. Both social networks also face the threat of Facebook’s rival microblogging platform Threads, which launches tomorrow.
Interestingly, though, Threads is planning to add support for ActivityPub, the protocol that supports posting on decentralized social networks including Mastodon. So over the long term, Threads could be another boon for Mastodon.
