Mastodon rejects more than five investment offers to stay a non-profit

An untouchable status

However, Rochko refused to play with his site’s non-profit status, calling it “untouchable.”

“Mastodon will not turn into everything you hate about Twitter,” further added Rochko. “The fact that it can be sold to a controversial billionaire, the fact that it can be shut down, go bankrupt and so on. It’s the difference in paradigms [between the platforms].”

It might be this approach that Musk finds problematic. Just two weeks ago, Twitter temporarily suspended the accounts of Mastodon after they tweeted information about the flight path of Musk’s private jet. 

At Mastodon, we present a vision of social media that cannot be bought and owned by any billionaire. Your ability to communicate online should not be at the whims of a single commercial company!

— Mastodon (@[email protected]) (@joinmastodon) April 14, 2022

Rochko wrote a blog post concerning the event saying it was a “stark reminder that centralized platforms can impose arbitrary and unfair limits on what you can and can’t say.” He also shared that monthly active users of Mastodon had risen from 300,000 to a whopping 2.5 million between October and November 2022.

In fact, the first two weeks alone post Musk’s buyout saw more than a million people join Mastodon taking its total user count at the time to 1.6 million. 

Same, same but different

Mastodon offers similar services to Twitter but consists of many decentralized, independently moderated servers. This means that unlike Twitter, which is one website, Mastodon is made up of thousands of websites that talk to each other. New users sign up for one such website or server but are not limited to following people or posts on that server alone.