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.
People will always be drawn to where the famous people are going and doing.
And that’s why government men are not going to stop using X
Twitter is now effectively part of the government. They won’t have a choice. But hopefully most others will flee and I wish more people were willing to take action on it or it will go the other direction.
I suggested on c/ProgressivePolitics about an email campaign to SAG and the WGA to get them to leave en masse as an act of union solidarity, but there didn’t seem to be much interest. Me doing it by myself won’t accomplish much.
Maybe Mastodon will end up like ham radio vs. Sirius XM. But at least that means we won’t have Joe Rogan or whoever they have over there.
Oh?
