Mastodon Users 2026

Mastodon promised a social media world with no billionaires, no ads, and no chaos. The good news: it delivered on all three. The not-so-great news: most people still chose the chaos. Mastodon has over 9 million registered accounts, though active users are far fewer.

Mastodon Users

Mastodon has seen a huge spike in new active users since Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter went through.

Report Highlights

As of November 2024, Mastodon has approximately 9.04 million registered accounts.
In October 2024, Mastodon had over 1.6 million website visits.
About 1.5 million of these accounts are active users.
Over 27% of Mastodon users are based in Germany.
The 25-34 age group makes up around 30% of all users.
Twitter drives over 90% of all traffic to Mastodon.
There are nearly twice as many male users as female users.
Mastodon is part of the Fediverse, a network of servers using the open ActivityPub protocol.
News is the most discussed topic on Mastodon.
Mastodon monthly active users peaked at 2.6 million in November 2022 following the Twitter acquisition.

Consider some fascinating statistics, from new users to how much it costs some users to host a server for others to use.

Mastodon has only about 1.5 million active users, compared to hundreds of millions on X (formerly Twitter).
Since October 27, 2022, Mastodon gained over 489,000 new users in just a few days.
None (0%) of Mastodon’s website traffic comes from paid advertising.
One user claims it costs him 358 Euros (about $371.50) per month to run a Mastodon server.
The Monday after the Twitter acquisition, 3,568 new accounts registered for Mastodon in just one hour.
Before the takeover, Mastodon averaged between 60 and 80 new registrations per hour.
After the acquisition, Mastodon started receiving as many as 75,000 new users per day.
As of October 21, 2022, Mastodon had roughly 2.89 million users across over 3,400 servers.
Monthly active users peaked at over 2.6 million in November 2022, but have since dropped to roughly 690,000 to 1.5 million depending on the source and time period.

**Mastodon is part of the broader “Fediverse,” a network of decentralized social platforms that all use the open ActivityPub protocol.**

This means Mastodon users can interact with people on other Fediverse platforms like Pixelfed and PeerTube.

For more on how people engage with digital content and platforms, see our report on literacy statistics.

Mastodon Demographics

Mastodon may be small, but we can find plenty of information on the demographics of its users, from gender to age.

Young adults tend to use Mastodon more than older adults, but there are users in all age groups.

Adults 25 to 34 years old are the biggest group on Mastodon, making up over 32% of users.
About two-thirds (66.41%) of Mastodon users are male.
Adults ages 18 to 24 make up 23.23% of all Mastodon users.
That means over half of all Mastodon users (56.19%) are between 18 and 34 years old.
Only 18.56% of Mastodon users are 35 to 44 years old.
Adults between 45 and 54 make up 12.13% of all Mastodon users.
An additional 8.01% of Mastodon accounts belong to people 55 to 64 years old.
Adults 65 and up make up the smallest group at only 5.11% of Mastodon users.
Mastodon tends to attract older, more tech-savvy users compared to newer platforms like Bluesky, which skews younger.

Mastodon Servers

Unlike other platforms, Mastodon has different servers that focus on various topics, but the general servers are probably the most popular.

Sadly, the general servers closed access to new users, but you can join servers based on your interests, and there are tons of them.

The Mastodon general social server is home to over 348,000 accounts.
People have shared more than 15 million statuses on the general server.
Mastodon considers servers “instances.”
In the two weeks after Musk bought Twitter, the number of Mastodon instances increased by 50%.
Each server hosts about 11.76% of all Mastodon users on average.
New users are now directed to mastodon.social by default, making sign-up easier than it was in 2022.

Mastodon Use Worldwide

The final sale of Twitter to Elon Musk may have increased interest in Mastodon, but it had a good amount of use before that.

Consider how use has grown in specific countries and all over the world.

During the week of October 31, 2022, Mastodon was the fastest-growing social network in the world.
In that period, Mastodon usage grew by 657% worldwide.
Website traffic to Mastodon increased by over 135% after Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter.
In the Netherlands, Mastodon’s user base grew by 751.1% in October 2022.
That same month, the UK user base grew by 655.5%.
Mastodon has an average bounce rate of about 40%, meaning most users visit at least two pages.
The average number of pages per visit is just under 6.5 pages.
Users spend an average of six minutes and nine seconds on Mastodon per visit.
The top five countries that use Mastodon are Germany, the US, the Netherlands, the UK, and Canada.
About three-fifths of Mastodon users (60.6%) visit the site directly.
Another fifth of users (20.5%) find the website through search engines.
Social networks, like Twitter, account for an additional 13.3% of all Mastodon website views.

Mastodon Posts and Engagement

Like any social platform, Mastodon has posts, and you can engage with that content. It works similarly to Twitter but still has some differences.

Here are some statistics and details regarding how to post and engage with other users when you join Mastodon.

Mastodon posts are called “toots” because one fan committed to the Mastodon Patreon for life.
Users can join more than 100 different servers on Mastodon.
A post on Mastodon can be up to 500 characters and can include text, audio, and video.
“News & Media Publishers” is the most popular category on Mastodon.
A post can go viral on Mastodon with only about 50 to 100 likes.
The most shared Mastodon toot of 2021 received almost 7,000 boosts and over 10,000 likes.
Hashtags are the one and only way for users who are not following you to find your posts on Mastodon.
You can send private messages on Mastodon through private toots.
Mastodon uses a chronological feed with no algorithm, so you see posts in the order they are posted, not based on what an algorithm thinks you want.
Mastodon also supports polls, a feature that some competing platforms like Bluesky have been slower to add.

For more data on how digital media shapes behavior, check out our customer retention statistics.

Mastodon Downloads

While you can use Mastodon on your desktop, the mobile apps are convenient for accessing your account on the go, whether on Apple or Android.

App downloads have increased about as fast as new users on Mastodon, in general, so consider the statistics for both main app stores.

About 322,000 users in the US downloaded the Mastodon app between October 27 and November 7, 2022.
Multiple third-party Mastodon apps saw between 7,000 and 19,000 app installs after Musk took over Twitter.
In the week after the acquisition, Mastodon reached 23rd place in the social networking category on the Apple App Store.
On Google Play that week, Mastodon reached 86th place in the social networking category.
App downloads increased from 15,000 to 972,000 on both the App Store and Google Play from mid-October to the beginning of November 2022.
That equates to a growth rate of 6,380% of app downloads.
Mastodon has received over 500,000 downloads on Google Play in its lifetime.
There are now dozens of third-party apps available for Mastodon, giving users more choices for how they access the platform.

Mastodon Competitors

Of course, Mastodon’s biggest competitor has been X (formerly Twitter), but a newer rival has emerged.

**Bluesky has now surpassed Mastodon in monthly active users**, becoming the leading Twitter alternative for many users.

About 900,000 people deactivated their Twitter accounts in the days following Musk’s acquisition of the platform.
Compared to the fast growth of Mastodon, Twitter only grew by about 21% after Musk bought the app.
Mastodon only received about 0.02% of the traffic Twitter received in October 2022.
The demographic distribution of Twitter and Mastodon users is almost identical, with over 66% of users on both platforms being male.
Mastodon gets about four times as much of its traffic from other social networks compared to Twitter.
Bluesky uses the AT Protocol, while Mastodon uses ActivityPub, meaning the two platforms are built on different open technologies.
Unlike Mastodon, Bluesky has a single unified sign-up process, which many users find easier for new users.
Despite being an alternative to Twitter, Mastodon is also similar to Discord due to its many community servers.

Other Mastodon Statistics

Some statistics don’t fit into other categories but are important to know about Mastodon, especially before you sign up.

Here are some numbers, from when it was founded to certain rules the platform has for server hosts.

Mastodon was founded in 2016 by Eugen Rochko.
Rochko is both the CEO and the only employee of Mastodon gGmbH.
He earns about 2,400 Euros per month for his work on Mastodon (about $2,490.50 in the US).
Mastodon gGmbH is a nonprofit organization.
Mastodon is open source, so no single company can shut it all down.
Server hosts must give at least three months’ notice to users before shutting the instance down.
You’ll find 0 ads on Mastodon since the CEO hosts the two main servers, while users fund other servers.
Google searches for Mastodon rose by 283% since the end of October 2022.
Total registered Fediverse accounts (including Mastodon) have grown past 11 million, though active users remain at roughly 1 to 2 million across the network.

For more on how younger generations use technology and social media, see our report on high school statistics.