One site that has benefited from the Twitter takeover is the open source, decentralized social network Mastodon. Along with a record-breaking weekend for downloads of the Mastodon mobile app, the nonprofit organization this week also unveiled a new achievement. Mastodon announced that 230,000 new users have signed up for the service in the previous week alone in a post on Twitter, where it has been effectively promoting its app to users who are now considering abandoning the platform. The network now has 655,000 active users as a result of these fresh sign-ups and users returning to earlier accounts they had created, according to the post.
The announcement that the network had gotten over 70,000 new sign-ups on Friday, October 28 — the day after Musk’s bid to acquire Twitter had been finalized — comes after reports that the network had seen its biggest number of users to date. According to third-party data from Sensor Tower, the Mastodon mobile app received about 91,000 new installs from Friday through Sunday, a 658% increase from the 12,000 installs it had the previous three days.