Heise Medien is now involved social.heise own instance of the Twitter alternative Mastodon in the so-called Fediverse. Not only the in-house media such as heise online or c’t Magazin will be active on it, but also the publishing house’s employees will be able to create accounts in the future. The account for this is on Friday @heiseonline moved from the instance mastodon.social to social.heise.
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With over 40,000 followers, the account is one of the largest in the media landscape overall, only @tazgetroete@mastodon.social from the “Tageszeitung” has more with around 42,000. Most of these accounts date back to the chaos at Twitter following Elon Musk’s takeover, prompting many to seek an alternative. The daily newspaper “Der Standard” from Austria already operates its own instance.
Growth in Fediverse
Heise online and the other Heise Medien brands were not active on Mastodon until the autumn. Only the account on mastodon.social existed, but it did not share any content. It was put into operation at the beginning of November and has been filled manually since then. It has been shown that almost as many visitors come to heise online via Mastodon as via Twitter, despite the significantly lower number of followers. For heise online and heise Security, there were already accounts managed by third parties, which automatically shared links to articles, as was the case for many other media.
The Twitter alternative Mastodon has been in development since 2016 and has always experienced growth spurts when dissatisfaction on and with Twitter was particularly strong. So far, however, none of these waves has been as large and sustained as after Musk’s takeover of Twitter. Although the platform is still significantly smaller than Twitter in absolute numbers, there is noticeably more going on there now because many particularly active users are switching. After growth weakened in Germany, for example, there was noticeably more recently from the USA.
Mastodon is part of the Fediverse (from “Federation” and “Universe”), a collection of decentralized services that have joined together and share content. Together they form a counter-model to the strongly delimited commercial platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. A basis of the platform are the so-called instances, which together form the entire network and communicate with each other. A popular comparison is e-mail: you can be registered with e-mail provider A and still send e-mails to users of e-mail provider B. Anyone who wants can operate such an instance and still be part of the federated network.
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