In another episode of “What has Elon Musk said now?”, the Twitter CEO had called the platform’s competitor, Mastodon, “Masterbatedone” in a tweet before he promptly deleted it. Fact-checking site Snopes posted to confirm that the tweet was indeed real.
“If you don’t like Twitter anymore, there is an awesome site called Masterbatedone,” Musk tweeted on 7 November 2022.
His tweet was referring to how many Twitter users have claimed that they have made the jump to Mastodon after Musk took over Twitter. Since his recent takeover, he has introduced many new rules that many users aren’t a fan of. He had also fired half of Twitter’s staff before asking them to come back after a day.
Understandably, a lot of users considered jumping to other platforms. One of the platforms is Mastodon, which is arguably most similar to Twitter. Mastodon claims that it now has over 655,000 users—with over 230,000 having joined in the last week.
What is Mastodon?
The six-year-old platform, however, is described as a “decentralised platform“—which sounds very much like you’re getting into NFTs. But don’t fret. It basically means that there are different servers that link together to form a collective network, and that they are owned by different people and organisations.
Mastodon lets users choose their own server, themed by things like an area or an interest like social, technology, gaming, and so on. You can still add other users even if you’re on different servers. The downside, however, is that if the server’s owner decides to abandon it, you lose your account. Mastodon is asking server owners to give their users a three month notice if they decide to close it.
Twitter users have opted to join Mastodon as a Twitter alternative as a protest after Musk’s Twitter takeover. And this prompted Musk to tweet (and quickly delete) his attempt at a pun. However, the Wayback Machine saved a snapshot of the message before it was removed—confirming that it was not a fake tweet.
Snopes posted the picture and even mentioned the picture’s “dirty screen”, even quoting a Twitter user saying that they were “surprised it took him this long to snap a photo of his gray pube-ridden screen”. My favourite part of Snopes’ article was that they said it was “unclear if the object was a pubic hair or something else.”
Besides Mastodon, some Twitter users have also opted to switch to Tumblr. However, it’s not exactly a social media platform, as it it more of a micro-blogging site than anything else.
