Elon's takeover of Twitter prompted some users to look for an alternative. While there isn't a true replacement for Twitter, one of the most similar alternatives is Mastodon, a distributed platform that's not owned by anyone.
I'll explain what that means and why it isn't a true replacement in a minute, but first, let's look at what Mastodon's app saw this week.
Before last week, Mastodon was a fairly unpopular app getting only a handful of downloads every day. Less than 500, according to our estimates.
Our App Intelligence shows Mastodon was downloaded a total of 9.5K times in 2021, the year it was launched.
Last week everything changed!
Downloads rose sharply and crossed 44K last Friday, as news of the acquisition broke. By the following Tuesday, Mastodon was downloaded more than 185K times.
That's an increase of 1,847% from all of 2021, and in just five days.
The trend sloped down though, and I expect it to continue sloping down because Mastodon isn't a replacement for Twitter.
The whole idea behind Mastodon is that no one entity owns the platform. Instead, Mastodon is a protocol for a platform that can be run by anyone on any server, anywhere.
Interesting in theory but for most users, means you'll likely join someone else's server and only have access to people on that server + the platform you will use will still be owned by someone. Truth Social uses the Mastodon protocol to run on its own server. Not a replacement.
The current hype is what's causing this increase in downloads, not real demand. I don't expect downloads to remain high.
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