Big thanks to @henshaw for breaking this story.

Also, did you manage to get any Pixelfed or Peertube accounts to work with Buffer?

Buffer adding Mastodon is just another example of the momentum that the Fediverse now has amongst developers -- and how this is going to push adoption forward.

This is the *real* story about Mastodon's growth during the past three months.

Yes, the first wave of Fediverse adoption came from people looking for a Twitter replacement.

But the next wave of adoption is going to come from an ecosystem of apps.

Why?

Because some of those Twitter migrants were developers.

And once they played around with the code, they all remembered how nice it is to build something on an open protocol.

Why are developers supporting the Fediverse even though the Fediverse "only" has 10 million accounts?

Because the Fediverse offers something developers crave: stability.

As Twitter already demonstrated, they can remove API access from developers for many bullshit reasons -- with no explanation.

No company should ever depend on Twitter's API -- or any Big Social API for that matter.

But ActivityPub is a W3C-backed web standard. It is an open protocol. Unlike Twitter, it is more trustworthy.

No, the story about the Fediverse's growth isn't about MAUs -- not that MAUs can be calculated precisely anyway.

The *real* story -- the one that the tech press should be writing about -- is the growth in:

1. Posts
2. Nodes
3. Apps

This is the beginning of a paradigm shift in social media and how it works.

Look, if I'm a social media app developer, I'm going to look for something that offers me two things:

1. Network effect - something people actively use
2. Protocol and API stability - something that won't change due to someone else's whims

This means the Fediverse.

Once developers en masse start developing for a platform, that's when the fun starts.

The iPhone didn't get interesting until developers made apps for it.

Ditto with the web.

We haven't even scratched the full potential for ActivityPub.