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.

  • It matters because a lot of mastodon instances are blocking bluesky access because bluesky is already playing unfair wrt API access and the data they pull, afaik.

    So many people on alt-instances will just never see bluesky and thus end up joining BS as well. (Oh, is that not what bluesky’s short name is?)