Ever since Elon Musk made a deal to acquire Twitter, another social network is seeing a good deal of sign ups — Mastodon, which apparently got 176,000 new users in the week following the news of the acquisition.

Mastodon is not exactly one website but a collection of federated communities called “instances”. So you can create an “instance” of your own or be a part of a community. Its code is open source, so creating an “instance” is not difficult, though it involves a bit of technical details. Mastodon, in fact, is more like Discord than Twitter.

The network’s creator Eugen Rochko was once a Twitter power user but the idea of centralisation bothered him because users are always at the whims of the shareholders. So was born Mastodon in 2016, shortly after Rochko’s graduation. Another problem, pointed out by Wired, is that when social media network’s scale, it’s difficult to have rules that fit every case and it’s impossible to apply those rules across millions of users. On Mastodon, it’s a federated structure.

Musk too wants to make Twitter more open, something he announced while acquiring the site for around $44 billion. He wants to make “Twitter better than ever by enhancing the product with new features, making the algorithms open source to increase trust, defeating the spam bots, and authenticating all humans. Twitter has tremendous potential—I look forward to working with the company and the community of users to unlock it”.

User base is still small for Mastodon but that’s how platforms begin their journey. Users go where they will find friends and colleagues and most of them are on Facebook and Twitter, so Mastodon continues to take small steps and hopefully there will be a leap sooner or later.