Total user count is a vanity metric. Monthly active users is more relevant and on that we are still way off from the ATH of 2.1 million from 2023.
Also, with the nature of the Fediverse where one single person can have multiple accounts, even this metric might be bogus.
As opposed to other social media platforms like reddit where you can only have one, right? 😜
I didn’t say that reddit’s metrics were any better so your gotcha makes no sense.
Is that total accounts? Because I have like 7 accounts…
Yeah it’s total accounts, total monthly active users is more like a million
Out of curiosity, why do you have 7 accounts?
https://feddit.org/post/3143093
- Multi-community simulator
- Defederation avoidance, usually paired with accounts on special interest servers you don’t want to risk losing access to.
- Porn and non-porn.
- Privacy by dividing online activities between multiple accounts to make it difficult to profile you and to maintain some pseudonymity.
Maybe to add to this, there may be folks like me who initially joined on things that became problematic or we wanted something “better” and are now on something different, leading to doubles. Not sure if my older accounts (like kbin) would show up but they might.
I have a few of those. During the reddit exodus when the API changes went live, I had to register on a few servers to finally get a working and stable account. Issues with email or setting up captchas to prevent bots resulted in a few of my accounts not going live until a week+ later on some instances.
Ah okay, makes sense, thanks!
In my case, somewhat chronological order:
- First Mastodon account, on server that is unmaintained but still running.
- Funkwhale
- Mastodon with full name for academic use, on relevant server
- BookWyrm
- Kbin (dead now)
- New Mastodon for hobby interests, as the server of my first account is worthless at this point
- Piefed
- Mbin
- My professional website is in the early stages of federating as well. Still work in progress, but I follow myself and it somewhat works
If a nodebb forum I have an account on decides to federate I might reach double digits.
Edit: I forgot I also have a Pixelfed account! So double digits already.
It’s not too hard. There are a bunch of different platforms one might experiment with as well as instances. Some will use multiple accounts for different needs or interests. On lemmy, multi accounts are useful for have different feeds, for example. I probably have 7-10. I’ve probably forgotten about a few of them. If you’re curious, it happens.
Some on different services, some with different subscriptions, some on different servers, etc.
I wish I didn’t have to, but federation for technical or political doesn’t work so well so I need an account for Lemmy, Kbin, Mastodon, and other less popular apps like Akkoma. Though 90% of my activity is on Lemmy.
Honestly me too. It took a while to find an instance I liked plus I like having an account on another instance in case this one goes down or gets defederated.
Why 7?
And Switzerland just closed their instance in part due to what they claim is a declining user base.
I’ve only seen Mastodon slowly creeping up, not decline.
Is that total users, or active users?
Total users will
neverrarely decline.They can. Servers that are delisted or go offline are removed from the counts.
I knew I shouldn’t have used the word “never”, although I was thinking that only “deleted” accounts would drop the total count. That’s also a good point.
But it still seems unlikely that there will be a LOT or cases where the total number drops by a proportionately large number, unless something really bad happens (or there’s some big initiative at some point to remove inactive or not accounts)
The more important stat - the one that people would be much more likely to be talking about seeing a “decline” in, in cases like this - is “active” users.
I was thinking more about the frequent cases of Mastodon instances shutting down because the admins got either tired of dealing with moderation or unable to afford the increasing operational costs. Seems like every week we get at least one instance announcing they will close up.
Suck it Bluesky
what bluesky is got to do with this?
They just hit 10 million last week. I’m just making a joke, don’t take it too seriously. I use both.
I wonder how many of them will actually continue using it after a few weeks/months
Aren’t most of those due to Brazilians? 3M or so?
Happy you’re all here!
happy to be part of the fediverse
I completely forgot but apparently I joined Lemmy exactly one year ago lol
Happy cakeday?
I was told just last month that the fediverse had 60,000ish people. How the fuck did it go from 60k to 12Mil in 1 month???
I really like it here, it feels like early Reddit after the dog exodus.
Autocorrect, my mortal enemy!
Is there a thing like that which shows ALL the services, with how many each has?
Lemmy is almost at 400k users alone. (391,247 ATM of writing). Its probably higher as there are servers that dont federate.
ATM? Active … Monthly? Can’t make out what it stands for…
At The Moment
Dang. I had kind of hoped this had been increasing a bit over the months.
sadly not really
It’s mostly Mastodon. (Shoutout to @[email protected] for posting the link to FediDB)
Misskey? 🤔 I heard it’s something Japanese? So probably a lot of Japanese fediverse users use it? I don’t think I’ve seen somebody from misskey in my interactions with the fediverse. Are they self-contained or something?
Misskey is like Mastodon but better, yes it’s Japanese. There are a lot of Misskey forks that are probably being counted in the Other
It surprises me a little, because on some instances there seems to be a lot of power users/tech influencer types, but not a lot of engagement between smaller accounts. Active users is around 1 in 12, which is again higher than expected, so maybe it’s just me/Hackyderm?
That’s probably just Lemmy active user you’ve heard, as the majority of user for fediverse is from mastodon. 12m is total user for the whole fediverse, active user is around 1m.
Sauce from here: https://fedidb.org/
Note, different websites have different total user counts. fedidb kinda goes up and down and I dont understand why.
But for example fedidb states 7,494,053 total Mastodon users whereas https://mastodon.social/@mastodonusercount states 15,467,187 accounts Pretty big difference. So there is probably much more accounts than what fedidb has. Or other counts are off by a large factor. Either way, lots of new faces in the fediverse! If anyone knows why theres such as discrepancy, let us know!
That’s pretty dang cool, and 12 is my favourite number too :-)
What’s your favourite number?
Is there any way to see older data?
https://fediverse.observer/stats&months=96
But shows different numbers.
