Rochko says he was too busy this week working on Mastodon to comment about the overloaded servers, and how the massive amount of new users had affected the network. The Mastodon founder posted that he had changed parts of how people sign up for new servers, allowing new users to filter by region, sign-up speed, and type. By November 8, he said he had fixed delayed feeds on two of the bigger servers.
Downtime on the decentralized network isn’t a new issue. Raman’s research looked at downtime on Mastodon in 2019 and found servers had been inaccessible about 10 percent of the time. It’s a frustration reminiscent of Twitter’s fail whale days. But even in Twitter’s early days, Raman says, it went offline only about 1.25 percent of the time.
Some of these growing pains come from users expecting that Mastodon will work with the same ease as products funded by Big Tech companies, but the nature of a volunteer-driven network means Mastodon can’t respond to crises like they do.
“People are trained not to be patient. We expect to pop in, sign up, and we’re onboarded,” says Robert Gehl, a professor of communication and media studies at York University in Canada, who has studied Mastodon. “This is a little bit more complicated. But in the long run, for people who are interested in a more community-oriented space, I think it is very much worth it.”
Part of Mastodon’s appeal is in hosting smaller communities, where moderators have rules and can regulate hate speech better than on some larger platforms. But with larger servers overwhelmed, people are applying for and flooding smaller ones, reshaping the communities that have grown there. Still, Stone and fellow cofounder Kev Quirk say they are excited about the diversity of opinion and topics coming in the conversations.
Fosstodon has seen its traffic increase tenfold since late October, says Quirk, and managing it has become a second full-time job over the past week. It saw increased interest even in April, when news of Musk’s agreement to buy Twitter first broke. “That nearly brought us to our knees,” says Quirk. “It’s been nothing compared to this.”
Jerry Bell, who runs the security-focused instance infosec.exchange on Mastodon, says his server saw challenges over the weekend as its users jumped from around 180 active users to some 8,000. On Monday, Bell posted a toot looking for volunteers to help him with security, support, and moderation on the instance.
“This has been a really big struggle because a lot of people are doing this as a hobby,” says Bell. “The pace with which things changed forced a lot of people to figure out how to react really fast.”
But Bell says the new users have also ushered in more substantive discussions on his instance. The small community was not always the most active. Already, he’s seen that change as more people from the security world join. And, Bell says, volunteers who want to help are pouring in already.
Mastodon’s meltdown may be short-lived. But that depends largely on instance runners expanding their efforts to host more users, and on users having the patience to navigate the network. The model for decentralized social media isn’t really new—it’s more a return to the old internet. And for some, that’s a welcome change.
“What’s happening now is causing people to rethink social media,” says Gehl. Mastodon “is kind of designed to adapt, because it’s comprised of all these different servers,” he says. “It just takes a little time to shake out.”
Will Knight contributed to this report.
