Just got this in my email because I signed up in Patreon as a supporter of a Mastodon node:
"So our IndieWeb server has seen a 4,333% spike in users, and every day is a new record in daily new users sign ups .... In that same time we have done one major server upgrade, and have had zero down time, and as we screen all new users before joining, so far have had zero cases of spammers or scammers from inside the instance itself. And been vigilant about blocking outside actors selling their wares or trying to push sypware, etc."
Let that sink in. 4,333% user sign ups on just this one node.
Mastodon as a whole added almost 300,000 users in the last week, and the rate of addition keeps climbing. Right now it's somewhere around 4000 signups an hour. Earlier in the week it was about 1000. Just under 100,000 people signed up in the last 24 hours. There's about 20,000 posts an hour, vs a much smaller amount two weeks ago. (I had to look at the numbers again and edit this post after I posted it, because they had jumped a bunch since I last looked a couple hours ago.)
It's not an overreaction or hysteria. It's a lot of people voting with their feet. In large part because they were already annoyed by Twitter before Musk even took over and were already open to trying something new. It's within the last month that Kanye West was mouthing off anti-Semitic slurs, before Musk even took over. And one can expect Trump to come back and start stirring the drama pot again. And Twitter's engagement "algorithm" means people get exposed to all this ugliness and the drama around it whether they hunt for it or not. I for one could never stand it and never got hooked in that world. On Mastodon I only see the interesting people I hunt for. It's a breath of fresh air.
It doesn't matter if they all stay. It doesn't have to replace Twitter. It's just something new. Twitter can remain, being what it is -- a cesspool of celebrity, narcissism, self-marketing and pithy, mean quips. It's always been that. Now it will just be worse because many of its more sophisticated users will migrate elsewhere.
In the meantime I welcome fresh blood over to Mastodon.
This is about the 4th? article about Mastodon to make the front page of HN in the last 24 hours? It's amusing that every time one gets posted most of the comments are naysaying, critical, and defensive, and "it will never amount to anything". Meanwhile, the growth continues...
Yep. Look at how Signal displaced Whatsapp (if anyone remembers this app that no longer exist) when users flooded over to it due to Musk-related controversies!
Let's speak in a month or two, see how many remain active, and then see whether this is an overreaction, and whether the experience design of Mastodon can really acommodate them?
I just saw it's about 640k in the last week. That's nice, but Twitter has over 250M daily active users.
Going from a signup to a DAU is a pretty rough game, but even assuming every signup became and stayed active, that's 40 more weeks of non stop momentum and growth at the same pace to meet Twitters numbers.
Unlikely, considering Mastodon already went through this with Gab (and later Trump's Truth Social ?) joining it a few years ago.
From what I've seen, it's mostly people sick and tired of Twitter's drama that decided to leave by themselves (whether today or in the last 6 years), while the people that were so toxic that Twitter banned them end up in mostly disconnected parts of Mastodon...
"So our IndieWeb server has seen a 4,333% spike in users, and every day is a new record in daily new users sign ups .... In that same time we have done one major server upgrade, and have had zero down time, and as we screen all new users before joining, so far have had zero cases of spammers or scammers from inside the instance itself. And been vigilant about blocking outside actors selling their wares or trying to push sypware, etc."
Let that sink in. 4,333% user sign ups on just this one node.
Mastodon as a whole added almost 300,000 users in the last week, and the rate of addition keeps climbing. Right now it's somewhere around 4000 signups an hour. Earlier in the week it was about 1000. Just under 100,000 people signed up in the last 24 hours. There's about 20,000 posts an hour, vs a much smaller amount two weeks ago. (I had to look at the numbers again and edit this post after I posted it, because they had jumped a bunch since I last looked a couple hours ago.)
It's not an overreaction or hysteria. It's a lot of people voting with their feet. In large part because they were already annoyed by Twitter before Musk even took over and were already open to trying something new. It's within the last month that Kanye West was mouthing off anti-Semitic slurs, before Musk even took over. And one can expect Trump to come back and start stirring the drama pot again. And Twitter's engagement "algorithm" means people get exposed to all this ugliness and the drama around it whether they hunt for it or not. I for one could never stand it and never got hooked in that world. On Mastodon I only see the interesting people I hunt for. It's a breath of fresh air.
It doesn't matter if they all stay. It doesn't have to replace Twitter. It's just something new. Twitter can remain, being what it is -- a cesspool of celebrity, narcissism, self-marketing and pithy, mean quips. It's always been that. Now it will just be worse because many of its more sophisticated users will migrate elsewhere.
In the meantime I welcome fresh blood over to Mastodon.
This is about the 4th? article about Mastodon to make the front page of HN in the last 24 hours? It's amusing that every time one gets posted most of the comments are naysaying, critical, and defensive, and "it will never amount to anything". Meanwhile, the growth continues...