BBC title correction according to their own article: "Some Twitter users jump to Mastodon - but what is it?". It's certainly not even remotely close to all.
> The social network says it now has over 655,000 users - with over 230,000 having joined in the last week.
Not all of them will be active. I think I even have an account I have not used in many years. The actual user base is likely smaller, and in a few weeks much less. There will be some attempts to link Mastodon and Twitter, but Twitter is incentivized to prevent decentralization of their platform.
Mastodon is obviously federated, but they also have quite a collective ideology they use to enforce policies. For example, rightfully or wrongfully, they blocked the largest Mastodon node Gab Social [1]. It wasn't even a majority vote, it was just those who maintain servers and develop apps that were able to do this - so a handful of people.
> The social network says it now has over 655,000 users - with over 230,000 having joined in the last week.
Not all of them will be active. I think I even have an account I have not used in many years. The actual user base is likely smaller, and in a few weeks much less. There will be some attempts to link Mastodon and Twitter, but Twitter is incentivized to prevent decentralization of their platform.
Mastodon is obviously federated, but they also have quite a collective ideology they use to enforce policies. For example, rightfully or wrongfully, they blocked the largest Mastodon node Gab Social [1]. It wasn't even a majority vote, it was just those who maintain servers and develop apps that were able to do this - so a handful of people.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastodon_(software)#Forks