There isn’t a single “Mastodon”, in the way there’s just the one Twitter. So let’s unpack this, starting with what we mean by “Mastodon”. ![]() It wasn’t the biggest wave by a long way, but it led to a major landmark: The number of posts in day surged past half a billion for the first time – from 466m to 568m. On December 16, after multiple journalists were banned/suspended from Twitter, there was a wave of journalists and others to join Mastodon. We still don’t have a good sense of how many Mastodon accounts are just there as people’s backup plans, and how many people are going to stay active, regardless of what happens at Twitter.This might include new instances that will be joining the network, but I don’t know. In the current comparative lull, however, “off network” Mastodon is growing accounts faster than the Mastodon network. But within that 8 million are 2.6 million “off network” accounts – that’s much smaller than the number of accounts within the network. The sources tallying up 8 million users are not a full picture of the “off network” Mastodon instances.The total has grown from over 3,300 “before”, to just over 8,400 by December 2. In the month or so since the big Twitter migration began, the number of instances has been fluctuating, with many new ones, and others folding.Instances being added to the network is the main way that Mastodon can scale. They can have anything from a single account to hundreds of thousands. The nodes in the Mastodon network are websites, usually called instances or servers.The highest peak so far was in November with over 134,000 new accounts on each of 2 consecutive days. The mean number of new accounts per day in the week up to December 2 is about 12,000. However, there have been lulls between waves of newcomers after events at Twitter. The number of new accounts is still growing.Some of the people who had joined much earlier – Mastodon started in 2016 – are still becoming active again. We’re starting to see the impact of people who opened accounts right after the takeover at the end of October, and haven’t logged back in. The percentage of active accounts has just dropped slightly. ![]() That added up to 2.5 million active users in the first days of December. Since then, 1.8 million accounts have been added, bringing the total to 5.4 million accounts – and close to half of all Mastodon accounts had been at least logged into in the last month (47%). Or to put it another way, 90% of Mastodon accounts weren’t active. Before the takeover, only about 10% of those Mastodon accounts had been used in the previous month.But even though they’re not unique individuals, accounts are called users (the same as at Twitter). That includes people with multiple accounts and bot accounts. When Musk took over Twitter, there were 3.6 million accounts in the Mastodon network.It’s probably something of an under-count, but I think it’s the most accurate depiction we have of the network we’ve joined. But I’ll start with an overview of the Mastodon network we’re joining based on the most official data. I’ll walk through this in detail below, including data sources, and why Mastodon statistics aren’t straightforward. Many of those websites are the home bases for spam, trolling, and hate speech, though that’s not the whole picture of what I’ll call “off network”. Those with the highest counts are so high because they include websites that could technically interoperate with the core Mastodon network, but they don’t fully, or at all. ![]() There are other data sources, too, and their tallies are different again. The data sources are measuring very different “Mastodons.” And the numbers that are up around 8 million don’t really represent the Mastodon network that most of us are in. The vast difference between 2.5 and 8 million isn’t just because the first is a tally of active users – accounts that have at least been logged into in the last month – and the second is the number of existing accounts. Mastodon’s growth in the last month has been extraordinarily fast – but just how fast? Did the number of users jump up to 2.5 million or 8 million in the month or so since Musk took over Twitter? Both those numbers for current users are swirling around, especially the 8-million one, because it’s coming from a popular bot account – the same bot that’s the source of a viral chart showing waves of Mastodon growth in response to events at Twitter.
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