Mastodon has become a real alternative to Twitter for those looking for a more decentralized and private approach to online interaction on this social network after the purchase by Elon Musk.
Mastodon is a decentralized social network with independent but interconnected instances
There are no official data on the number of users that Mastodon has, but according to the data provided in Mastodon itself by the @mastodonusercount account, which collects and publishes daily statistics on the number of users of the platform around the world, they have already been exceeded 10 million users.
This figure would mean that 6 million new users have been added in the last six months, since in November 2022 the platform had around four million users.
However, it is important to note that Mastodon is a decentralized network , which means that there is not a single central database that contains information about all users, which could mean that the total number of registered accounts is higher.
Unlike centralized “traditional” social networks (such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram…) Mastodon is made up of multiple “instances”, each of which is a separate and autonomous community that may have its own rules and policies. Each instance has its own user database and therefore an accurate estimate of the total number of Mastodon users worldwide cannot be made.
The largest instances of Mastodon
Despite this, the @mastodonusercount account is a valuable source for approximate information on the use of the platform. The most recent account data shows that the largest instance of Mastodon is mastodon.social , with over 1.3 million registered users . Other major instances include mstdn.jp with over 750,000 users and mastodon.online with over 600,000 users.
What makes Mastodon different from traditional social networks is its decentralized structure and its focus on privacy and security. Each instance of Mastodon has its own set of rules and policies, which means that users can choose a community that suits their interests and values. Plus Mastodon is ad-free, which means users are not the product and are not inundated with ads in their feed.
Mastodon is based on the ActivityPub distributed social networking protocol, which enables interoperability between different decentralized social platforms. This means that Mastodon users can interact with users of other decentralized platforms that use the same protocol, such as PixelFed (a decentralized alternative to Instagram) and PeerTube (a decentralized alternative to YouTube) in a similar way to email, in the that each user has a different provider but everyone can send and receive emails with each other.
Although Mastodon has not yet achieved the same popularity as traditional social networks, its focus on privacy and decentralization has attracted a committed user base who value online freedom