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.
People will always be drawn to where the famous people are going and doing.
And that’s why government men are not going to stop using X
Twitter is now effectively part of the government. They won’t have a choice. But hopefully most others will flee and I wish more people were willing to take action on it or it will go the other direction.
I suggested on c/ProgressivePolitics about an email campaign to SAG and the WGA to get them to leave en masse as an act of union solidarity, but there didn’t seem to be much interest. Me doing it by myself won’t accomplish much.