9 million Mastodon accounts is extremely likely this month.

According to my math, an average of 1,115 new accounts per hour over the next 10 days would be needed to reach this milestone.

During the last hour, 1,780 new Mastodon accounts were made.

It was just a couple of weeks ago that the 8 millionth Mastodon account was made.

And already, we have 8,713,949 accounts.

This is incredibly fast growth.

It's also entirely feasible that by Dec 2023, there will be 20 million Mastodon accounts.

Consider this: you'd need 1,344 new account registrations per hour to achieve this milestone.

For the past 3 months, we've exceeded this average.

Mastodon doesn't actually represent the actual size of the Fediverse.

There's ~20,000 nodes on the Fediverse. Mastodon instances are about 12,000 nodes.

That means 8,000 nodes are NOT running Mastodon.

This means that it's entirely possible for the Fediverse to already exceed 10 million accounts.

One further food for thought: once Tumblr and Flickr join the Fediverse, the full network effect of the Fediverse will surpass Twitter.

Tumblr: 472 million accounts
Flickr: 65 million accounts

And wait -- the potential network effect gets spicier!

Are you sitting down? Here goes!

44% of all websites that exist right now run on WordPress.

Right now, connecting a WordPress site to the Fediverse is just a matter of installing this plug-in.

If just a fraction of WordPress sites connect to ActivityPub, then the network effect of the Fediverse will eclipse Big Social.

https://wordpress.org/plugins/activitypub/

ActivityPub

The ActivityPub protocol is a decentralized social networking protocol based upon the ActivityStreams 2.0 data format.

WordPress.org
@atomicpoet Can you explain what the benefit of installing this plugin would be? I'm pretty new to Mastodon, but do a have a blog on my website. Would this plugin push my blog posts into followers' Mastodon timeline, for example?
@weheartgames @atomicpoet It works pretty well at pushing content out in to the Fediverse, but not so well (if at all) for pulling it FROM the Fediverse.
So, people can follow your blog, and comment on it, but you can't follow them, or even see their content.
You can respond to comments they make on your blog, but that is about it, unfortunately.
I'm hoping that after Tumblr becomes part of the Fediverse, they turn their attention to WP, which they also own.
@stuartb Ok thanks for the reply. I wonder how it works if I have comments turned off on my blog. If someone replies to a blog post on Mastodon, where does their reply go, for example.
@weheartgames
That I have no idea about, sorry - I would assume that if comments are turned off then they wouldn't be able to even try, but it's not something I've ever tried.