Mastodon started eight years ago, on March 16, 2016, as an independent and free alternative to corporate-dominated social networks. But even though it has been around for a long time, it has never been as popular as its bigger competitors. However, that may soon change.
But before we move on to the exciting numbers, let’s briefly explain the principles on which it is built for those who might not know.
What Is Mastodon?
As mentioned, Mastodon is a social networking platform, but it is pretty different from the ones you might be more familiar with, like X or Facebook. Unlike those mentioned above, which are owned and controlled by big tech companies, Mastodon’s beauty is its decentralized nature.
This means no single company controls everything. Instead, various individuals and organizations run their servers, making the whole network independent, more resilient, and diverse.
Moreover, it is open source, meaning anyone can see how it is made, contribute to its development, or even use it to start their own server. Now, letโs move on to the numbers, which are more than impressive.
We Are 15 Million
In a post dated October 9, 2023, Eugen Rochko, founder of Mastodon, shared that the social network gained an extra 2,344,088 users from servers that hadnโt been included before without specifying the total number of registered accounts.
Today, on March 18, five months later, Erik Uden, admin of mastodon.de, posted an exciting message, stating clearly: “We Are 15 Million.”
As the network is decentralized, counting these numbers will always be inaccurate and other counting methods yield different results, but this is still something to celebrate.
I believe in this approach of social networking and that it is the more human-oriented, non-commercial approach we need in order to fix our societal, personal, and political divide.
Erik Uden, admin of mastodon.de
A quick reference to the social networkโs Mastodon Users bot, which shows in real-time the total number of currently registered user accounts, confirms this, showing the number of 15,001,149 (at the time of writing).
And even though this number is much smaller compared to X, which currently counts over half a billion users, it is amazing how popular Mastodon is becoming. And for those of us who love open source, this is really exciting news.
Indeed, many factors are behind the platformโs rapid growth in popularity. While the main reasons are linked to changes in X over the last year and a half, discussing them in detail is outside the focus of this article.
Whatโs important to highlight is that Mastodon is gaining attention as an alternative to the corporate-dominated social media landscape, promoting a more decentralized, inclusive, and user-controlled online social environment.
People are drawn to Mastodon for various reasons, mainly its emphasis on privacy and community-driven nature. It represents a more open and interconnected way of social networking, where users have a say in how their platform is run and can move freely between communities without losing access to their network.
Hitting 15 million users is an impressive milestone, and that number is set to increase. So, if you haven’t joined yet, now’s the time. You’ll enjoy what Mastodon has to offer.
