- As of November 2024, Mastodon has approximately 9.04 million 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 100% as many male users as female users.
- Mastodon uses two fee types: federated and local.
- Users can create one account per server they join.
- News is the most discussed topic on Mastodon.
Mastodon Users
Mastodon has seen a huge spike in new active users since Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter went through.
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 million active users compared to 238 million Twitter users.
- Since October 27, Mastodon has gained over 489,000 new users.
- 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.
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 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.
Mastodon Use Worldwide
The final sale of Twitter to Elon Musk may have increased interest in Mastodon, but it’s been around for a while before that and had a good amount of use.
Consider how use has grown in recent days and weeks 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.
- Mastodon’s website ranks 56th place for social networking websites in Germany.
- That was a massive increase from 154th place the prior month.
- Traffic to the Mastodon website more than doubled from 595.7K visitors per month to 1.4 million the next.
- 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.
- Referrals come in fourth place, accounting for 5.2% of all website traffic.
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 aren’t following you to find your posts on mastodon.
- You can send private messages on Mastodon through private toots.
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.
- 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.
- As of November 2022, Mastodon is the 9th most popular free social app on Google Play.
- Mastodon is currently in 16th place in social networking apps as of this writing.
Mastodon Competitors
Of course, Mastodon’s biggest competitor is Twitter, so you should consider how the growth and total number of users compare to the bigger platform.
Here are a few statistics regarding the change of users on both Mastodon and Twitter after the sale of Twitter.
- 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.
- Twitter is still growing though, with an increase of more than 150,000 downloads between October 27 and November 3.
- 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 (13.3% vs. 4.3%).
- As of November 2022, Mastodon sits in 36,002nd place for all website traffic, while Twitter is in fourth place.
- Despite being an alternative to Twitter, Mastodon is more similar to Discord due to its many 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 can power other social networks, the most well-known of which is probably Truth Social.
- Gab is another alt-right network that uses Mastodon, but it’s no longer part of the federated network of servers, so you have to access it separately.
- 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.
- The open-source platform does bring about some brand safety concerns, so it’s not the best for marketers.
- Google searches for Mastodon rose by 283% since the end of October.
References
- https://sensortower.com/blog/twitter-acquisition-recap
- https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/your-guide-to-mastodon-what-is-it-and-how-is-it-different-from-twitter/
- https://www.theguardian.com/media/2022/nov/01/mastodon-twitter-elon-musk-takeover
- https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-twitter-takeover-user-growth-rivals-mastodon-tumblr-2022-11
- https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/11/numerous-social-apps-see-gains-in-wake-of-twitter-chaos-new-data-shows/
- https://expandedramblings.com/index.php/mastodon-statistics-facts/
- https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2021/12/mastodon-recap-2021/
- https://www.reuters.com/technology/mastodon-what-is-social-network-hailed-twitter-alternative-2022-11-07/
- https://www.insiderintelligence.com/content/mastodon-usage-spikes-after-musk-s-twitter-takeover
- https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.joinmastodon.android&hl=en_US&gl=US&pli=1
- https://apps.apple.com/us/app/mastodon-for-iphone-and-ipad/id1571998974
- https://www.businessofapps.com/news/mastodon-app-downloads-jump-more-than-6000-after-musk-takes-over-twitter/
- https://absolutelymaybe.plos.org/2022/11/13/mapping-the-mastodon-migration-is-it-a-one-way-trip-or-an-each-way-bet-for-science-twitter/
- https://www.similarweb.com/website/mastodon.social/vs/twitter.com/#overview
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28951281