Boom! About six hours ago, one count of Mastodon users crossed over 8,000,000 users! The latest hourly count of the @mastodonusercount bot as I write this is:
8,015,904 accounts
+2,333 in the last hour
+54,536 in the last day
+398,175 in the last week
It’s fascinating to watch the growth:
12 days to grow from 6 to 7 million, and then 15 days to grow from 7 to 8 million. How long will it take to grow to 9 million?
A key point is … this is NOT the total count of ALL Mastodon users!
As noted in the bot description, it is the "User Count Bot for all known Mastodon instances”. The key word there is “known”. Mastodon is a decentralized network where anyone can set up their own Mastodon server. They don’t have to tell anyone. They don’t have to ask permission. They just gave to download the source code and set up their own server.
They can then choose to federate - or not - with other Mastodon servers. It is certainly possible that there are more Mastodon servers out there that haven’t been incorporated into this count.
Still, this is a “good enough” approximation of the user count to be able to look at the phenomenal growth. I’m excited to see where this all goes!
Congrats to all involved!
And of course you can find me there at https://mastodon.social/@danyork (or search on @danyork@mastodon.social )
