Firefox, Tumblr team up to support Mastodon social network

SAN FRANCISCO: Firefox and Tumblr have teamed up to support Mastodon, the open-source social network, amid Elon Musk's efforts to disparage the rival platform.

On December 16, Twitter suspended Mastodon's @joinmastodon account after it shared a link to the newly-registered Mastodon account of @ElonJet, an account that broadcasts public flight path data of Elon Musk's private jet, which was previously suspended from the micro-blogging platform itself.

According to The Guardian, Musk admitted the apparent move to prevent Twitter users from migrating was an error.

Musk said, "that one was a mistake," on a Twitter live stream with a former intern.

Mastodon has jumped from approximately 300K monthly active users to 2.5 mn, which includes journalists, political figures, writers, actors and organisations, between October and November.

Firefox developer Mozilla disagrees with Musk's view and has joined the rush to create a presence on the platform, according to the report.

The company announced that it would begin to run a Mastodon "instance", one of the decentralised servers upon which the social network rests.

"Our intention is to contribute to the healthy and sustainable growth of a federated social space that doesn't just operate but thrives on its own terms, independent of profit- and control-motivated tech firms," Steve Teixeira, chief product officer at Mozilla was quoted as saying.

A Mastodon instance is similar to an email service provider -- all users will need to join one instance but can communicate with users on others once they have, the report added.

Moreover, Tumblr, a microblogging and social networking website also said that it will begin supporting the technology in the near future, according to founder Matt Mullenwegg.

Tumblr is also "dealing with waves of users right now", said the report.