Gregory's ServerI got asked about this by somebody from WIRED so I got some numbers together. I believe that Mastodon servers have gained around 49,000 new people since March. Our iOS app downloads rose by 109%. On mastodon.social, I am seeing a 71% increase in sign-ups and 36% increase in monthly active users as people are coming back to their old accounts.
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@peptostate Mastodon exposes total and active user numbers through its public API. Separately, there is also a public API listing other domains a server is aware of. Like many people I am running a stats aggregator that crawls over these APIs to understand how many Mastodon servers are up and how many total and active users there are. It is not a guarantee that a server that exists will be crawled, but then some servers have inflated numbers, so it is neither a lower nor upper bound estimate. @peptostate I go through slightly more effort to ensure that the numbers I collect are from Mastodon servers and not, say, Pleroma masking itself as Mastodon, and to exclude servers that are Mastodon forks that have disabled federation. Running Mastodon in limited federation mode does not expose these statistics, as I am also not interested in capturing statistics of servers that are not properly part of the network.  @Gargron That all makes a lot of sense to me. Many thanks for answering to this degree of detail. I am rooting for your success! @Gargron @Gargron I've been spending a lot of my time complaining about a lot of services I used recently, and am feeling better after having left Uber/Amazon/Twitter. I have been masodon curious for years and I have found multiple things refreshing vs twitter and I just got here. (I have poked my head in a few times, but the mobile app made me come on over for realsies)  @Gargron First, congratulations. I hope that momentum continues. Second, are you a little bit worried that, with growth, content moderation will become more of a challenge? @Gargron I'm a new user and am getting my head around the interface. I do like this and hope to use more as I learn more about it.  |
@Gargron I'm curious about how you collect stats across servers, what your expectations are about the quality of the data you collect across servers, and the options mastodon admins have for omitting themselves from your methods of stats collection.