Ello is a rapidly-growing “anti-Facebook” social network

When we broke the news of Ello’s impending launch last March, we worried it might be destined for obscurity, like the thousand other failed, would-be Facebook competitors. But the mysterious social network and anti-Facebook hideaway has suddenly exploded in popularity as Facebook has begun driving away artists, performers and the LGBTQ community. When they started their roll-out in July, Ello got a few sign-ups from the mailing list generated from word-of-mouth buzz. Each day after, they grew twice as large, which ramped up to three times as large each day. Then, after The Daily Dot declared yesterday that “the great gay Facebook exodus” had begun, interest in Ello went nuclear. Ello’s founder told Betabeat that he’s seeing 4000 new signups each hour. People are frantically tweeting each other about Ello, and traffic on our Ello stories from six months back has exploded. So what is Ello? Ello is an anachronistic social network designed by Paul Budnitz, designer toy maker, bike builder and author extraordinaire. It’s a social network with a manifesto — a grandiose cry for social networking that empowers people, and against social networks that lie, manipulate you and treat you like a product.