Mastodon’s Growth: The Big Picture

We have been tracking the growth of Mastodon, the distributed social network that’s caught the attention of many of those seeking an alternative to Twitter, by looking at the performance of a couple of its most popular and centrally important domains. While that’s a valid indicator, those domains (mastodon.social and joinmastodon.org) – are only “jumping off points” to the thousands of domains that exchange the posts and connections of their users.

To get a better understanding of how much traffic to the Mastodon network has grown, we aggregated the traffic from more than 200 servers or instances. The total number of Mastodon servers is more like 4,000, but that includes small ones used by a single person or a handful of users. We consulted other lists of the largest/ most popular servers to produce this broader analysis.

The Mastodon network is based on open-source software and a World Wide Web Consortium specification for data exchange between social websites, ActivityPub.

Many of Mastodon’s most enthusiastic advocates are looking for an alternative not only to Twitter but to the whole idea of corporate-controlled social media where rules for what content should be allowed or banned can be set by anyone other than the users. But the “fediverse” of services that support ActivityPub isn’t limited to Mastodon. That anti-corporate ethos wouldn’t necessarily prevent the integration of for-profit social networks such as Automattic’s Tumblr, which has announced a forthcoming integration.

The mastodon.social domain is the original Mastodon server, administered by Mastodon project founder Eugen Rochko, so it tends to be one of the first shown in search results when people are searching for information about Mastodon.

The joinmastodon.org domain is a directory of servers, some of which cater to specific communities like fosstodon.org (free open-source software) and journa.host (one of the recently-established domains for verified journalists). Once new users pick a specific server, or “instance,” they log into that domain but still have access to posts and users from other domains.

On an aggregated basis, traffic for these servers was up more than 1000% year over year in November, according to Similarweb estimates. Or if we look at total annual traffic (trailing 12 months through November), traffic was up 140% thanks to the surge that started in October / November.

Traffic to joinmastodon.org, the directory of Mastodon servers, was up more than 1,500% year over year in November.

Daily traffic has been growing but also fluctuating significantly in the days since Elon Musk took over as CEO of Twitter. The November 18 peak you see below seems to have coincided with a flurry of “How to Join Mastodon” articles appearing in widely read publications, such as Axios and BuzzFeedNews.

The number of time users are spending on Mastodon is also trending higher. For example, time per visit on mastodon.social averaged 3.4 minutes in 2021 but topped 6 minutes in October 2022 and 5 minutes in November.

The Similarweb Insights & Communications team is available to pull additional or updated data on request for the news media (journalists are invited to write to press@similarweb.com). When citing our data, please reference Similarweb as the source and link back to the most relevant blog post or similarweb.com/blog/insights/.

Methodology

Disclaimer: All data, reports and other materials provided or made available by Similarweb are based on data obtained from third parties, including estimations and extrapolations based on such data. Similarweb shall not be responsible for the accuracy of the materials and shall have no liability for any decision by any third party based in whole or in part on the materials.

Image: Kira Sokolovskaia, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

by David F. Carr

David covers social media, digital advertising, and generative AI. With a background in web trends since the 1990s, he’s also the author of "Social Collaboration for Dummies".