Mastodon sees a boost from the 'X exodus,' too, founder says | TechCrunch
techcrunch.com
Decentralized social network Mastodon is also seeing some uplift from the X "exodus," founder Eugen Rochko shared on the platform just ahead of the

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.

  • Maestro
    2•4 hours ago

    How much does that matter when they can federate with each other?

    • HumaniusEnglish
      11•2 hours ago

      To my knowledge Bluesky does not use ActivityPub and is therefore not compatible with Mastodon for federation
      They use a different underlying protocol for communication between instances, called AT Protocol

      Edit: Different, but not proprietary

      • Maestro
        3•3 hours ago

        There are bridges that speak both ActivityPub and AT

    • @damnthefilibuster
      3•4 hours ago

      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?)