Mastodon And BlueSky Get A Boost As Elon Musk's Twitter Imposes Post Reading Limits

Musk, earlier on Sunday, temporarily enforced limits on post readings to prevent "data scraping and system manipulation". 

Twitter's German alternative Mastodon as well as BlueSky have gotten a big push in the wake of the new Twitter "mess" that was a result of Twitter boss Elon Musk's announcement to restrict the number of tweets for users on the platform they can see in a day. Musk, earlier on Sunday, temporarily enforced limits on post readings to prevent "data scraping and system manipulation". 

Following the announcement of imposing new limits to the amount of posts users can see appears to be driving a surge in activity at Mastodon, a German rival that prides itself on its decentralised, user-driven structure, says a report by news agency Reuters.

"Looks like Mastodon's active user base has increased by 110K (110,000) over the last day. Not bad," Eugen Rochko, creator and chief executive of Mastodon, wrote on the platform.

"I would prefer it if Elon Musk was destroying his site during the work week. This isn't the first time," another post from Rochko read.

Announcing the temporary limits on post readings, Musk wrote on Sunday: "To address extreme levels of data scraping and system manipulation, we’ve applied the following temporary limits."

Musk's announcement came as Twitter experienced a global outage, thus, frustrating millions of users worldwide, including those in India, who were unable to access the platform. According to the outage monitoring website Downdetector, over 7,000 users reported Twitter issues.

Twitter also recently disabled browsing access for users without accounts on its web platform, citing the need for such drastic measures due to "extreme levels of data scraping." Musk also claimed that numerous artificial intelligence (AI) companies, ranging from startups to major corporations, were engaging in extensive data scraping practises.

Meanwhile, Twitter Blue subscribers recently started getting the ability to post longer tweets as the company increased the character count for a tweet to 25,000. It should be noted that the character limit has been increased only for paid Twitter users. To recall, soon after taking over Twitter, tech billionaire Musk had said that the platform will allow users to monetise written content. Soon, Twitter Blue paid subscription was announced.