📈 The new social web has reached its next milestone: For the first time, the #Fediverse has over 4,000,000 users! 📈 Today, the counter at https://the-federation.info/ shows 4,003,742 users in the Fediverse, out of which 2,761,886 users are on #Mastodon, 762,367 on #diaspora, and 249,904 on #Prosody. Fast growing projects are #Peertube (69,954) that more than tripled and #Pixelfed (25,206) that almost doubled the number of users in the last year. #matrix #pleroma #writefreely #friendica #wordpress +
Perhaps the best indicator of the ‘health’ and growth of the fediverse is the number of instances. I also wonder how many people have created accounts of ‘big’ instances and then move to smaller, newer instances.
I don’t think so, if you would look at hubzilla for example you would see that the number of instances grew smaller yet the number of active users grew significantly. I think that for most people when it comes to self hosting “the juice isn’t worth the squeeze” and they are better of in some instance of some dedicated nonprofit like feneas or disroot.
As I am on the original mastodon.social instance and have to no plan to change (at least for the time being) I can understand that. Perhaps a better way then would be to kind of see how many instances are on the network because that definetely is good for the fediverse and then count the users of the top 10 largest instances. After all, those top 10 instances have quite a lot of users already to be honest.
I only know one other person that is on the fediverse and yet a use it weekly, because it has an appeal to me in a way that Diaspora* for example never had. I guess I like microblogging and what the people I follow microblog about.
I think it’s safe to say that Mastodon has been a success, wether that success will ultimately still be there in 10 years is very hard to know. It needs to bring more people in that know eachother in real life I think, or perhaps via the other platforms like Pixelfed for example is better suited for ‘IRL’ people. After all, how many friends that know eachother off the internet interact on Twitter ?
Perhaps the best indicator of the ‘health’ and growth of the fediverse is the number of instances. I also wonder how many people have created accounts of ‘big’ instances and then move to smaller, newer instances.
I don’t think so, if you would look at hubzilla for example you would see that the number of instances grew smaller yet the number of active users grew significantly. I think that for most people when it comes to self hosting “the juice isn’t worth the squeeze” and they are better of in some instance of some dedicated nonprofit like feneas or disroot.
As I am on the original mastodon.social instance and have to no plan to change (at least for the time being) I can understand that. Perhaps a better way then would be to kind of see how many instances are on the network because that definetely is good for the fediverse and then count the users of the top 10 largest instances. After all, those top 10 instances have quite a lot of users already to be honest. I only know one other person that is on the fediverse and yet a use it weekly, because it has an appeal to me in a way that Diaspora* for example never had. I guess I like microblogging and what the people I follow microblog about. I think it’s safe to say that Mastodon has been a success, wether that success will ultimately still be there in 10 years is very hard to know. It needs to bring more people in that know eachother in real life I think, or perhaps via the other platforms like Pixelfed for example is better suited for ‘IRL’ people. After all, how many friends that know eachother off the internet interact on Twitter ?