A small social network called Mastodon has been seeing its sign-up numbers climb after thousands abandon their Twitter accounts.
It comes after Elon Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion (£32 billion) last month. Since then, huge numbers of staff have reportedly been fired with the new owner since announcing plans to start charging users for verified accounts.
Because of this, people have been deciding that they no longer want to be a part of Twitter anymore, and are searching for an alternative social media site to sign up to.
And one of the popular choices is Mastodon, which saw over 70,000 new people sign up the day after Elon Musk announced he'd taken over Twitter, according to the Guardian.
Here's everything you need to know about Mastodon and how it works.
What is Mastodon?
Mastodon is a small six-year-old social network that was developed in Germany.
It's free to use, and is described as decentralised - meaning that no one person owns it or can control it, and it's up to individual users instead.
The site has many different servers, and users can even create their own versions. Rather than being just the one website, anyone can join or build their own - these are called "instances".
Mastodon explained: "All instances are owned, operated and moderated by the community that creates them, and not some large corporation which tracks your data to sell to advertisers.
"In most cases, Mastodon instances are crowdfunded, not financed."
It works similarly to Twitter, in that people can share pictures, join conversations and connect with others - all you have to do is decide which server to make your account on, which can easily be moved if you change your mind.
Who created Mastodon?
Mastodon was developed by a German programmer called Eugen Rochko.
He was eager to build a social network that wasn't just controlled by one person or company, like Twitter. He created Mastodon in 2017 after hearing rumours that Twitter was going to be bought over by PayPal founder Peter Thiel.
The network has seen thousands of sign-ups over the past couple of weeks, and has surpassed the million mark.
"We’ve hit 1,028,362 monthly active users across the network today," Rochko tooted - Mastodon’s version of Tweeting - on Monday, November 7. "That’s pretty cool."
It's still a small amount compared to rival Twitter, which reports over 200 million active users every day.
But Mastadon is free to use and also doesn't have any adverts, as it's mostly supported by crowdfunding.
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