SoylentNews

tonyPick writes:

From the FSF website is the release that there has been a sudden increase in the use of GNU Social following the suspension of a prominent Twitter user.

GNU Social provides a decentralised social networking system,and:

Twitter user @Barbijaputa is popular in Spain, with more than 167,000 followers. She's known for criticizing the government or any other political parties or groups of power.

On January 14th, Twitter suspended @Barbijaputa's account after she participated in a conversation about sexually transmitted diseases. The next day, she created a profile on GNU social node Quitter.se and started posting. Her Twitter followers proved willing to follow her all the way to GNU social, and began joining existing nodes en masse and starting their own.

The growth was so explosive that the some of the existing GNU social nodes were unable to handle the traffic

There is further background information on GNU Social at the project homepage.

It's worth noting that the numbers (in the thousands) are still relatively low, compared to the Twitter statistics:

The node Quitter.es (Quitter Spain) was created to handle some of the extra people that overloaded existing GNU social instances like Quitter.no and Quitter.is. Quitter Spain now has 6,667 users and counting and Quitter.se reports 4,982 users, due in part to the incoming Spanish users.

However it's still interesting to hear about the improvement in traction gained in a relatively short time frame, and it will be worth monitoring to see if the gains persist or continue.

Originally spotted at HackerNews