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.
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.
How much does that matter when they can federate with each other?
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?)
LOL. That acronym. They brought this on themselves.
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
There are bridges that speak both ActivityPub and AT
That is good, I believe. We are going to have different communities in different places with no reliance on a single platform.