4 Things You Probably Didn’t Know About Mastodon — The Anti-Twitter
Medium joined the anti-Twitter Mastodon and Tony Stubblebine is sure every writer needs to be on this platform.
As far as I’m concerned, Twitter is one of my main marketing channels to promote my content and drive my business growth.
However, no one knows if Elon Musk will change Twitter for the better or worse. I’ll stick with Twitter for now, but I’ll also try Mastodon.
Especially, after I broke the news that Medium joined Mastodon a few days ago.
I think it’s the perfect time to join the platform, build a following on Mastodon, and get a feel for the highly hyped platform.
Here are 4 things that you probably didn’t know about Mastodon:
1 — Twitter is losing. Mastodon is winning.
It’s no secret that more and more users flee Elon Musk’s Twitter.
The Guardian shared that Twitter is to lose 32M users in two years.
At the moment, Twitter has 260M daily active users.
Comparatively, Mastodon only sees 2.5M daily users.
Why?
It’s a newish platform that highly profits from Musk’s takeover.
In fact, Mastodon just reached 9 million user accounts.
2 — More and more creators become Musk-averse.
A lot of creators and business owners are tired of the messy game Elon Musk is playing with Twitter.
They are seeing the social media network really disrupted by Elon.
For the better or the worse. They don’t know yet.
However, they are realizing the need to find a Twitter alternative.
Twitter just doesn’t feel like the place and social media network they came to be anymore.
They are longing for something else.
Mastodon is the anti-Twitter.
It’s a decentralized (or federated) social media network and it’s open source.
The idea: anyone can run parts of this network.
It’s “an emerging force for good in social media,” Tony Stubblebine, Medium’s CEO, stated.
On Mastodon, there is no king who rules it all!
Its users are the kings.
3 — You can post “toots”.
What’s super exciting is that you can practice the art of microblogging, meaning writing up to 500 characters.
On Mastodon, you can post toots with a 500-character limit per post.
As you might know, I love microblogging. I love to write short form posts and create shorts on TikTok and YouTube.
Mastodon offers a great opportunity for us to share our Medium stories with a broader audience and to connect with other Medium writers.
“To date, we’ve focused on article-length writing. It’s how our company got its name: as a home for medium-length writing on the internet,” Tony says.
“Today we are extending what we do into the short-form medium (lowercase m) with an instance on Mastodon, me.dm.”
4 — You can build a (future) following and gain traction.
If you have your own brand or business and are thinking about a Twitter alternative, Mastodon might be a good place to start.
You can engage in public conversations, share your content and post your thoughts in a decentralized network.
Let’s take the publishing company Medium as an example.
It could really suffer if Twitter were to experince a massive decline.
Its main marketing and communications channel is Twitter (I guess based on its history; Medium founder Ev Williams is also a co-founder of Twitter).
The platform gets most of its traffic from Twitter.
If more and more writers and readers exit Twitter, Medium was to lose traction, and you too.
Bottom Line
I think it’s the perfect time to amplify your message, join the platform (and Medium’s community), build a following on Mastodon, and get a feel for the highly hyped platform.
Additionally, Medium’s CEO is putting trust into Mastodon and shared:
“But we are 100% sure that Mastodon has long term legs independent of any exodus from other social media platforms.”
“Every writer should be on the platform”, he added.
What are you waiting for?
Let’s connect on Mastodon @kristinagod@techhub.social
I’m curious. Will you jump in too?
👍 Trending on Medium:
😱 Super important!
Tomorrow, Elon Musk will shut down its newsletter service Revue. If you’re using it make sure to migrate your subscribers and your newsletter issues. Otherwise, you’ll lose everything! Here’s more:
I joined a while ago. It's one more place to share my Medium and Substack posts.
The best and worst thing is how it relies on users to "boost" posts.
It means your audience is perhaps more limited until you get a large following. But it also means you don't see as much junk.
I'm still finding my feet there.
(And I just followed you.)
I joined awhile ago. I need to pay more attention to it though.