Now @gruber may say, "Mastodon is the 800 lb. gorilla in the Fediverse ecosystem."

Maybe, but it's nowhere near as dominant as many believe.

According to fediverse.oberserver, there are 21,723 Fediverse instances -- of which there are 11,944 instances.

That means there are 9,779 instances that are *not* Mastodon.

By ignoring all those non-Mastodon instances, 3rd party client devs are ignoring a huge amount of potential in the Fediverse.

Further, devs like @gruber over-estimate the dominance of Mastodon.

Certainly, in terms of the Fediverse, Mastodon is huge.

But PeerTube and Pixelfed are nothing to sneeze at either.

PeerTube has 306,337 users. That's not as many as Mastodon.

But PeerTube's userbase isn't anything to sneeze at either.

What's more, just like Mastodon, PeerTube could grow. Especially if a black swan event happens with YouTube -- which is feasible!

Another thing @gruber perhaps doesn't consider is that Mastodon isn't the only Fediverse platform that's growing.

Pixelfed more than doubled it's userbase during the past year.

* Feb 2022: 73,100 users
* Feb 2023: 153,486 users

This is despite the fact that there was no Instagram migration!

So why are so many mobile devs just ignoring Pixelfed?

Here's a chart that shows the growth of Pixelfed over the past year.

A further consideration for @gruber: Mastodon's dominance of the Fediverse is unlikely to last forever.

Tumblr is joining. So is Flickr. Post even said they will be integrating ActivityPub.

How well will these apps be playing with the rest of the Fediverse? I don't know.

But the argument that Mastodon should be the primary consideration because it is the largest won't even be true in 2023.

Here's a dose of sobriety for everyone who thinks "Fediverse = Mastodon".

Last I checked 44% of the web runs on WordPress.

What happens if even a fraction of these websites install the ActivityPub plug-in?

Suddenly, WordPress becomes the dominant Fediverse platform.

@atomicpoet
I'm curious to see if Tumblr and Flickr would keep following through those plans, considering that those statements were made while Mastodon adoption had exponentially increased activity versus the stabilization we have had.

Furthermore if those plans pan through, I am curious to see if their platform approaches end up going for one giant instance instead of multiple smaller ones. One that would be unwieldy to moderate against as a monolithic all-or-nothing block of majority users.