Summary
Mastodon, the decentralized social network, is seeing renewed growth amid an “X exodus.”
Monthly active users rose to 894,000 across all servers, with app downloads increasing 47% on iOS and 17% on Android.
November saw a 27% jump in sign-ups, adding 90,000 new accounts.
Rochko emphasized Mastodon’s independence from venture capital, contrasting it with competitor Bluesky, which recently raised $15M in funding.
Despite its gains, Mastodon’s activity remains below its late 2022 peak. Rochko remains optimistic about the future of the fediverse, the open social web powered by ActivityPub.
Most of the reporters I follow for sports/news have joined bluesky but not mastodon. At this point I think Bluesky is going to win the bulk of twitter exodus in the end and Mastodon will remain extremely niche.
That is good, I believe. We are going to have different communities in different places with no reliance on a single platform.