TORONTO — Thousands of Twitter users are in search of new places to congregate and share thoughts online after Elon Musk's purchase of the social network last month. While the Tesla and SpaceX leader mused about charging for verification and laid off hundreds of Twitter workers last week, people started flocking to these alternate platforms. Mastodon Mastodon has been one of the biggest winners of the surge away from Twitter. German programmer Eugen Rochko, who launched the platform in 2016, posted Monday that Mastodon hit 1,028,362 monthly active users. The open-source, decentralized — not run by any one entity —…