April hasn’t ended but Eugene Rochko wanted to share what has happened thus far with Mastodon during the month. It is an interesting post. Always neat to see explosions like this from the inside. Like this bit:
So, April, huh. Twitter changed the reply system, which everybody told them they shouldn’t do, and then removed the iconic egg avatar for new users, and suddenly all of my work of telling people that one day Twitter would do something they didn’t like and they’d need a viable alternative paid off. Mastodon caught on on Infosec Twitter, which is both huge and influential, and (somehow, I do not quite understand how) also French Twitter. France really likes free software and decentralization, as it turns out! Think explosion of users from 20,000 to 42,000 in the span of two days. Most importantly, this offset a wave of press attention, from French journals to tech journals to non-tech journals. I had phone and text interviews with The Verge, Mashable, Wired, Engadget and more. I actually don’t remember exactly, because I chose not to read the resulting (or any) articles for the sake of my mental health. (On the other hand, my mother collected them all). The Mastodon band has playfully acknowledged the project. We also witnessed the birth of a meme of a man not being able to be found by William Shattner.
Most people would likely say that The Verge was the start of the wave. But Eugene shows us it wasn’t. Totally worth reading the entire post.