Mastodon, an open source and decentralized social network, has more users than it thought. The service, which competes with Twitter and other newcomers like Threads, Bluesky, Pebble and Spill, had been undercounting its users due to a network connectivity error, according to founder and CEO Eugen Rochko.
Rochko said that the error was impacting the metrics reported on Mastodon’s statistics aggregator on its joinmastodon.org/servers page, which had been undercounting users between October 2 and October 8. The issue has now been resolved, and Mastodon actually has 407,814 more monthly active users than it had been reporting previously.
The adjustment also included a gain of 2.34 million registered users across an additional 727 servers that had not been counted due to the error. That leaves Mastodon with a total of 1.8 million monthly active users at present, an increase of 5% month-over-month and 10,000 servers, up 12%.
Mastodon’s growth comes at a time when Twitter’s future is uncertain. Twitter’s new owner, Elon Musk, has made a number of disruptive changes to the platform, including removing headlines from link previews and announcing plans to charge all users a small fee. He has also been criticized for allowing clickbait ads to run on the platform.
These changes have angered many users and publishers, and some have suggested that they will scale back on using Twitter as a result. This could lead to more users migrating to Mastodon and other competing platforms.
The sources for this piece include an article in TechCrunch.
