Mastodon sees a boost from the ‘X exodus,’ too, founder says

Decentralized social network Mastodon is also seeing some uplift from the X “exodus,” founder Eugen Rochko shared on the platform just ahead of the weekend. While the Twitter-like startup Bluesky has been capturing headlines and attention for its rapid adoption among former X users, a smaller group has apparently turned to the open source networking platform Mastodon, which has seen downloads increase by 47% on iOS and its monthly active users grow to 894,000 across all Mastodon servers, Rochko says.

In a post on Mastodon, the founder and CEO noted that official app downloads were growing. In addition to the 47% on iOS, they had increased by a smaller 17% on Android. Month over month, sign-ups were also up by 27% with 90,000 newly registered accounts in November.

“We may not be the biggest by numbers yet, but Mastodon (and the fediverse) has proven itself to be an effective and reliable communications platform over the course of the last 8 years, and does not depend on venture capital to survive,” wrote Rochko, subtly jabbing at one of Bluesky’s potential weaknesses with that last bit.

While Mastodon is largely crowdfunded and grant-supported, Bluesky has gone the more traditional startup route by raising money from outside investors. The company last month closed on a $15 million Series A, led by Blockchain Capital. Bluesky plans to generate revenue via subscriptions at some later point and by providing other paid services, like access to custom domains. For some former X users now choosing Mastodon, Bluesky’s obligation to chase venture-sized returns is a non-starter.

Despite Mastodon’s recent “X exodus”-fueled adoption, the latest activity still falls below late 2022 levels, when Mastodon had gotten an early boost thanks to other Twitter drama, including the product changes Elon Musk introduced around moderation and paid verification. As of November 2022, Mastodon had surpassed 1 million monthly active users and was seeing “thousands” of registrations per hour, it said at the time.

Things have slowed since for the X alternative, which today has north of 7.6 million total users compared with Bluesky’s now more than 19.4 million, which is up from 16 million just days ago.

Despite the threat from Bluesky, Rochko says that the fediverse — or the open social web powered by the ActivityPub protocol that underpins Mastodon and newer efforts like Meta’s Threads — is the “long game.” (Threads’ 275 million+ users are not counted among the 10.9+ million broader fediverse users because the platform isn’t fully federated yet.)

“I spent 25% of my life working on Mastodon. It’s kind of wild when you think about it,” Rochko mused on Mastodon. “When I started, Google+ was still around. We’re doing what one of the most resourceful companies in the world couldn’t do. It’s not easy. It’s always easier to just build A Website, then slap some ads on it,” he said, likely referencing Threads’ plan to be ad-supported. “But the fediverse is the long game.”