Twitter is blocking people from posting about Mastodon

Since Elon Musk successfully purchased Twitter, the company has been facing some rather severe issues. Because of this, a ton of people have been leaving the platform and flocking over to another microblogging platform called Mastodon. This platform has seen exponential growth in its user base, and apparently, the bird app does not like that. According to BBC, Twitter is blocking people from posting links from Mastodon.

In case you don’t know what Mastodon is, it’s a microblogging site much like Twitter is. Instead of being thrown onto one giant algorithmically curated feed, you will post your content on dedicated servers. Also, posts can have up to 500 characters rather than 240. Other than that, it’s a pretty straightforward social media site that allows you to post pictures, polls, videos, links, and your hot takes.

Twitter is blocking Mastodon links from being posted

Talk about punching down! While Mastodon might not exactly be a fledgling platform, it’s still a lot newer than Twitter, and it has a much smaller user base. A recent report by Business Of Apps puts Twitter’s monthly active users at about 450 million. Mastodon, on the other hand, is sitting at north of 1 million users. This is why it’s a shame that Twitter is blocking Mastodon links from being posted.

This is something we were able to replicate. We tried posting the link to a Mastodon account in a tweet, and it was instantaneously blocked. While posting the tweet, the preview appeared for a few seconds, then disappeared. Then, after pressing “Publish”, it was nowhere to be found.

This does not only apply to tweets. If you think you can get around this by posting a link on your profile, you are sadly mistaken. If you try to post any Mastodon links to your profile, the site will also block it. It will refer to the link as being “potentially dangerous”- as though it were to some sort of malware.

To top things off, the @JoinMastodon Twitter account has been suspended. We know that migrating to a different social media site isn’t what Twitter wants, but blocking people from posting content from a much smaller website comes off as really sleazy. Also, these actions will only cause more people to drop Twitter in lieu of another platform. We’ll just have to see how this whole thing pans out.