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 Masodon 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.
@atomicpoet
As I gather you found out in the thread :) this doesn't apply to WordPress blogs living on WordPress dot com in any of the non-professional payment tiers.
I don't know what fraction of that 44% of websites are in that category, but I bet it's the majority, just because that's the thing that's easiest to do.
Maybe WP will introduce that as available to everyone, or at least to everyone paying at least the like $5 ad-free fee...
