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.

  • @2pt_perversion
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    73 hours ago

    Most of the reporters I follow for sports/news have joined bluesky but not mastodon. At this point I think Bluesky is going to win the bulk of twitter exodus in the end and Mastodon will remain extremely niche.

    • Maestro
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      fedilink
      23 hours ago

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

      • Humanius
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        9
        edit-2
        22 minutes 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
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          fedilink
          21 hour ago

          There are bridges that speak both ActivityPub and AT

      • @damnthefilibuster
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        32 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?)

    • @Viking_Hippie
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      53 hours ago

      That’s John THE mastodon, thankyouverynuch! 😤

  • @cybervseas
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    54 hours ago

    Maybe Mastodon will end up like ham radio vs. Sirius XM. But at least that means we won’t have Joe Rogan or whoever they have over there.