Eugen RochkoI got asked this by a few different journalists today, so I'm just going to share the numbers. 10,801 people signed up on different Mastodon servers today, and 22,139 since last week.
Update: 49,215 new users across different Mastodon servers since yesterday. Probably a lot of them are actually from yesterday. My crawler only runs once a day so I get a bit of a delayed view of things.
So, that total... By the end of day, it's more like 70,849... That's quite a lot for a single day, isn't it. Federated social media is better than commercial silos, and I'm happy that more people are learning about it.
tinybug@Gargron what does federated socia media mean
Martin Puppe@tayloredin @Gargron That means that you are free to pick where you want to create your Mastodon account. You picked mas.to, Eugen is at mastodon.social, I am at social.anoxinon.de. There are a lot more so-called instances that other people use. But all of them can talk to each others because the instances share a common protocol that tells them how to speak to each other. /1
@tayloredin @Gargron This is similar to email. You can pick Gmail but there are a lot of other providers to choose from. You can also install email software on your own server and use that. Or you could even write your own software and use that as long as your software follows the proper protocols for exchanging emails. /2
@tayloredin @Gargron A lot of people are worried what Elon Musk will do to Twitter and they can’t do a lot about it. They can leave, sure, but they will have to leave the people that they are following and that are following them behind.
If someone were to take mas.to in a direction that you don’t like you can just go to another instance and still talk to your friends.