Spare a thought for the legal Twitterati over the weekend faced with the agonising decision of where to put out their observations on the law.

Many have spent years building up a sizeable following on Twitter. However the bien-pensant applecart has now been upset by the platform’s acquisition by Elon Musk. After spending $44bn on his new hobby, Musk is understandably keen to make the company - expected to lose $700m next year - remotely economically viable. 

For tweeters, one alternative is to move across to the fast-emerging Mastodon, which has tripled its user numbers over the past week. The open-source software platform appears to have many of the same functions as Twitter, though it works as a decentralised network of hubs rather than a single global ‘town square’.

As the legal blogger David Allen Green noted (on Twitter): ‘I do not migrate lightly. I spent two years litigating the once-famous #twitterjoketrial to explain Twitter and social media to the judiciary… And I have 239k followers, which is a lot, but when a thing is broken, it is broken.’

Other prolific tweeters to post 'likes' to the new home of online bellowing include professors Paul Bernal and Steve Peers and the Secret Barrister. Once we hear that legal commentator royalty Joshua Rozenberg has joined the Mastodon exodus,  we will conceded this really is A Thing.

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