https://techcrunch.com/2022/10/31/mastodons-microblogging-app-saw-a-record-number-of-downloads-after-musks-twitter-takeover/

There are signs of a small but growing Twitter exodus underway following Elon Musk’s closure of the deal to buy the social media platform last Thursday. While many Twitter users are taking a wait-and-see approach and may not have fully deleted their accounts at this time, a sizable number of people are currently checking out Twitter alternatives. One of those alternatives is Mastodon, a decentralized social network that gained over 70,000 new sign-ups on Friday, the day after the Musk Twitter takeover completed. And this weekend, the official Mastodon mobile app saw a record number of downloads as more people fleeing Twitter began to seek out a new online home.

Mastodon, to be clear, is not a new platform. The free and open-source microblogging service debuted in March 2016, offering a different approach to online social networking. Similar to Twitter, you can follow other users and create posts that can be liked and retweeted (or “tooted,” in Mastodon lingo), use hashtags, share media, and more. But unlike Twitter, Mastodon is a distributed social network where users sign up on individual servers, or nodes, each with its own theme, rules, language, and moderation policy. For instance, the most popular server currently is mastodon.social, touting 817,219 users. A Japanese server pawoo.net is just behind that with some 766,399 users.