Mastodon founder says investors lining up since Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover - The Guardian

The laminitis of Mastodon has said helium has rejected approaches from much than 5 US-based investors, arsenic the Twitter rival grows successful popularity pursuing Elon Musk’s chaotic debut arsenic a societal media owner.

Eugen Rochko, who launched the open-source societal web successful 2016, told the Financial Times helium had received the offers from Silicon Valley backstage equity firms to enactment “hundreds of thousands of dollars” into the product.

The popularity of Mastodon has surged since the $44bn acquisition of Twitter by Musk successful October. Rochko said past week that Mastodon had jumped from 300,000 monthly progressive users to 2.5 million successful the aftermath of the Twitter deal, which has seen Musk reinstate banned accounts specified arsenic Donald Trump’s and temporarily suspend journalists astatine publications including the New York Times and Washington Post.

Rochko, a German bundle developer, told the FT his platform’s presumption arsenic a non-profit organisation was “untouchable” and its independency was portion of its entreaty to users. Mastodon has much than 9,200 patrons connected Patreon, the online rank service, who are contributing much than £28,000 a period to the level betwixt them.

“Mastodon volition not crook into everything you hatred astir Twitter,” helium said. “The information that it tin beryllium sold to a arguable billionaire, the information that it tin beryllium unopen down, spell bankrupt and truthful on. It’s the quality successful paradigms [between the platforms].”

Mastodon was dragged into Musk’s arguable attack to moderation connected Twitter this month, aft its ain Twitter relationship was suspended for sharing a nexus to the Mastodon relationship of @elonjet, an relationship that Musk had suspended for showing the determination of his backstage jet. Musk besides briefly banned all links to Mastodon and suspended users who tweeted their Mastodon usernames.

In a blog post, Rochko wrote: “This is simply a stark reminder that centralised platforms tin enforce arbitrary and unfair limits connected what you tin and can’t accidental … At Mastodon, we judge that determination doesn’t person to beryllium a middleman betwixt you and your assemblage and that journalists and authorities institutions particularly should not person to trust connected a backstage level to scope the public.”

Mastodon is made up of “instances”, oregon decentralised servers. Two of the astir fashionable instances are tally by Rochko, with galore smaller ones operated by hobbyists. Once a idiosyncratic has joined an instance, they tin pass with users connected others.