Twitter Users Have Caused a Mastodon Meltdown

Fosstodon is an online community where people chat about open source tech. They talk about VR and tech gear, but they also post pictures of changing autumn leaves and pets. It’s been a small, tight-knit community for five years ever since its founders moved from Google+ to Mastodon.

But on Monday, it went offline. The culprit was an influx of new users spurred by Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover, forcing Fosstodon to migrate its data to a larger server.

Since Musk bought the bird app last month, users are looking for ways to access Mastodon, the open source microblogging platform that isn’t quite Twitter but seems to be the closest thing to it, and they’re signing up for its many servers in droves. And Fosstodon, whose usership has grown from a list of about 3,000 active members to an unwieldy 40,000 total members, is far from the only server on the network to run into trouble. “We can’t keep up with those requests, so we just opened the floodgates,” says Mike Stone, cofounder of Fosstodon. “My concern right now is the people that are coming in don’t understand the point of Fosstodon specifically, as opposed to the greater Mastodon environment.”