Mastodon has Eight Million Accounts Today

Mastodon has reached eight million accounts today. That’s close to the population of Switzerland and two million less than London. Mastodon is growing because it was ready to scale up at the right time. As Musk and Twitter shift towards the Right, and as Musk perpetuates conspiracy theories, on a daily basis, so he prepares the idea conditions for other social networks and opportunities to thrive.

As Twitter loses users, and engagement so other social networks are more likely to thrive. Every day I check on Twitter, and every day I am repulsed by what he is sharing. Every day I feel that I should abandon Twitter. I don’t, for now, for a simple reason. On twitter there are conversations to be had twenty four hours a day, whereas on Mastodon, you have to wait for people to show up. That wait is a good reason to do other things, like return to Twitter.

What I am waiting for, impatiently is for enough people to leave Twitter for Mastodon, for Mastodon to be entertaining at all times, without long moments of silence. I am not convinced that Mastodon will be the ideal Twitter replacement. For now it is a curiousity that has the ability to scale up as required, within the current requirements.

Mastodon is to “microblogging” what WordPress is to blogging. It’s a way to create an instance of a service which you can either use in solitude, and yet access what others are discussing, or a way of having a small personal community. We’re used to syndicated blogs. The fediverse is almost the same, but goes by the name “federated”. In both cases it’s spread across servers, more flexible, more adaptive to demand, and easier to sustain. WordPress and other content management systems could be written to take advantage of this distributed networks of communities.

That’s it for today.