Mastodon’s user base is continuing to grow as porn spam bots have largely taken over X/Twitter.
We’ve covered the continued growth of Mastodon off and on here on Freezenet. Last year, we were noting that a data tracker pegged the user count to be just over 11 million users.
Today, we decided to check in on what the data tracker says is the user count. Apparently, according to the tracker, the user count is closing in on another major milestone. The account, MastodonUserCount, says that the platform is less than 100,000 users away from reaching 15 million users:
14,904,207 accounts
+409 in the last hour
+10,145 in the last day
+65,660 in the last week
If the numbers are accurate, that would be a considerable milestone for the platform. What’s more, it is another bit of good news for those who consider protocols to be a better approach to social media as opposed to platforms (which is the current dominant model).
The news for supporters of social media protocols is a nice followup to the news happening with Bluesky. Last month, Bluesky opened up the ability to federate. From Techdirt:
While Dorsey has since soured on the approach that Bluesky is taking, preferring the nostr protocol’s approach (and deleting his Bluesky account entirely), I continue to believe that Bluesky is the most interesting and most promising of the various attempts at building a better social media system out there. I explained many of the reasons why a few weeks ago when Bluesky finally dropped its “private beta/invite-only” setup and opened to the public.
And yet, as many people pointed out to me, Bluesky still wasn’t really decentralized in any real way. It remained entirely centralized, as the company worked to build up both the new protocol for it, ATProtocol, and the Bluesky reference app on top of the protocol.
However, last week, Bluesky took that next step and opened up the ability to federate.
Today, we’re excited to announce that the Bluesky network is federating and opening up in a way that allows you to host your own data. What does this mean?
Your data, such as your posts, likes, and follows, needs to be stored somewhere. With traditional social media, your data is stored by the social media company whose services you’ve signed up for. If you ever want to stop using that company’s services, you can do that—but you would have to leave that social network and lose your existing connections.
It doesn’t have to be this way! An alternative model is how the internet itself works. Anyone can put up a website on the internet. You can choose from one of many companies to host your site (or even host it yourself), and you can always change your mind about this later. If you move to another hosting provider, your visitors won’t even notice. No matter where your site’s data is managed and stored, your visitors can find your site simply by typing the name of the website or by clicking a link.
We think social media should work the same way. When you register on Bluesky, by default we’ll suggest that Bluesky will store your data. But if you’d like to let another company store it, or even store it yourself, you can do that. You’ll also be able to change your mind at any point, moving your data to another provider without losing any of your existing posts, likes, or follows. From your followers’ perspective, your profile is always available at your handle—no matter where your information is actually stored, or how many times it has been moved.
It’s currently limited to smaller situations, of people who basically want to self-host their own Personal Data Servers. While things get settled, there are rate limits and guardrails for these PDS’s (so, things like only 10 user accounts for the time being). If you want to understand this even more (even if you’re not technical), Bluesky’s more “technical” explanation is still highly readable.
So, a step in the right direction to say the least, but not as big news as when Bluesky opened up signups to everyone earlier that month. That news is what ultimately enabled me to grab my own account, though I haven’t really had the chance to set up much as of now (more on that once I have a chance to look deeper into it. I can technically be found on there, but you won’t find much as of yet).
Meanwhile, X/Twitter continues to be a burning husk of what it once was. The platform has been completely inundated with porn spam bots. It’s the second biggest reason why I have limited my activity on the platform (the biggest, of course, being Elon Musk). While I don’t actually post all that often, occasionally, the few straggling people left behind on that hellscape post informative things.
For instance, one user posted a news article on Australian publishers falsely claiming that Facebook is a hive of disinformation now thanks to a lack of news content. I was asked what I thought about the development (along with several others).
I offered a lengthy tweet thread explaining how journalists tend to get a bad interpretation of what platforms are like, the evidence about how users aren’t moving, and why I thought the comments about disinformation taking over Facebook in Canada are not likely to be true.
Even from an account that isn’t really active, both the question and answer tweets sparked a massive flood of porn spam bots after:
Unless you are using X/Twitter to read a specific persons tweet stream, the platform is completely unusable these days.
While Musk supporters love to falsely claim that Mastodon is a dead protocol with only a couple of users hanging out, I’ve had not only a substantially larger following, but a substantially larger amount of user interactivity – so much so that I’ve basically made Mastodon my primary social media platform- er, protocol. The experience is far better over there to me.
For those who are about to ask, yes, I hope to eventually have a much bigger presence on Bluesky sometime soon as well over and above my account placeholder.
So, ultimately, we are continuing to see the growth of two healthy protocols here. This as X/Twitter continues to be a borderline unusable mess. Honestly, though, if the burning down of X/Twitter means social media becomes even healthier than before, I think users all over end up winning here.
Drew Wilson on Twitter: @icecube85 and Facebook.
