How many Mastodon instances are there? How many active users are there? Depends on where you look and how you count.

Quick sanity check across datasources...

vmcrawl 
Instances: 9,226
MAU: 787,574

joinmastodon.org 
Instances: 7,952
MAU: 780,355

FediDB 
Instances: 9,193
MAU: 1,037,321

(Based on 20 Feb 2026 API data for all sources)

The world, may never know.