With Musk’s entry into Twitter’s offices, it seems that the horror scenario is indeed happening in reality. The tycoon fired about half of the employees, some even via tweet The company’s current and former employees announced that they are stopping using Twitter and moving to an open source network called ‘Mastodon’ which is experiencing a huge jump these days
A group of Twitter employees and those who were recently fired as part of billionaire Elon Musk’s takeover of the company, set up a server on the competing social network Mastodon for employees and former employees of Twitter.
According to the report on the ‘Davar’ website, the server was established under the name macaw.social by a former employee from Seattle. On the about page of the server it was explained that it is a ‘small server operated by ex-Twitter employees mainly for ex-Twitter employees and their friends’. Those who wish to join the server are asked to indicate their current or old employee number on Twitter, which team they belonged to or other details that would verify their identity as company employees or former company employees. Currently, the server already has over 670 users, the vast majority of whom are former and current Twitter employees.
The Twitter logo. Illustration. Photo: Ansplash.
“So, uh, yeah, I’m no longer employed by Twitter, according to the email I received in the middle of the night,” wrote Jim Redmond, who worked in Twitter’s System Reliability Management (SRE) department, on the server. “Not going to elaborate or speculate here or elsewhere about it, but well, it’s nice to have time to deal with messages from recruiters.”
Meet Mastodon:
Mastodon was founded in 2016 by Eugene Rochko (born in Russia 1993, most of his life lived in Germany) as a project intended to be a non-commercial open source replacement for Twitter. Like many open source projects, there are advantages as well as disadvantages. It is non-commercial and therefore relies on many hundreds of contributors of code, time and money. Like any open source project, it depends to a large extent on the goodwill of the active people and operators of the platform and is operated according to the norms that are created in the using and strengthening community. There are no research and development departments, user and data validation teams, community relations or customer service. But there are no advertisers or advertisements either. The users are not the product. Neither is their information. But what is perhaps most important at this point in time – as often happens in open source projects, is a bit complicated and there are several technical and human barriers to joining.
In contrast to Twitter, which operates entirely as a unified network under centralized management – Mastodon is based on multiple servers, where each server actually constitutes an independent community that manages itself and sets its own community rules. Each user chooses which server to open his account, but can also follow users operating from other servers, and even from several other social networks that support a similar code.
Mastodon founder Eugen Rochko recently wrote “I think it’s glorious that there is now a server on Mastodon run by people who used to work for Twitter. I couldn’t have imagined it when I started in 2016.” Since the acquisition of Twitter, Mastodon has experienced a significant jump in the number of active users, which has grown from about 600 thousand to 1.75 million, and the total number of accounts registered on it has already reached 6.8 million.
“Mastodon is very young, and we are a select group of engineers here. This is not a set of experience that the project has enjoyed in the past,” Travis, a former Twitter employee, wrote in a conversation that developed on the server about the user experience of the new network. “The great opportunity we have here as engineers is to ease the barriers to entry. The more servers there are, the better it will be for all of us. The more servers, the less friction and hostility. This is exactly the culture we live for. We are totally looking at the new generation of free code programmers here.”