It looks like #mastodon is 80K users away from the 10M accounts mark.
https://mastodon.social/@mastodonusercount/110041576953340658
If the ongoing onboarding rate of >1K users per hour holds, the mark should hit in 3 to 4 days, so there's a good chance the network will get into the upcoming spring with 10M accounts.

Ten million users may seem like nothing special, especially compared to the orders-of-magnitude higher numbers of the big social silos like Twitter or the ones demoted by Twitter (sorry but I still can't say that without laughing: that anyone would actually come up with such a stupid idea to try and plug the bleeding loss of users, essentially confirming that the only way to keep users on their platform is to not let them know of the existence of alternatives)

As I was saying, 10 million may not seem like a particularly large number, but it carries a lot of symbolic weight, if not else because of the way we humans perceived numbers and quantities: 9.99? What a bargain! 10? Nobody got money for that.

I expect to still see a lot of write-ups on how the Fediverse cannot succeed, coming up with the most idiotic reasons for that, mostly out of ignorance, but the actual cognoscenti see the sign of its entrenching success, from the officialization of the WordPress ActivityPub plugin to the empty promises of federation from ex-Twitter BlueSky to Meta's vaporware.

I think one of the most interesting example of massive display of ignorance from the pundits decrying the non-viability of Mastodon is their take on the lack of ads. This is ignorant not only because ads are neither necessary nor sufficient for the survival of a platform, but because it's not even true that advertisement is inherently impossible on Mastodon or the Fediverse in general.

The fact that some MissKey instances actually display ads in their timelines may come as a surprise to some, but for a pundit to not be aware of this simply shows how far the term has gotten from the original meaning of “learned, knowledgeable person; expert” to become a shorthand for “talking head”.

And yes, ads like the MissKey ones don't federate (any server that tried that would be defeated in the blink of an eye), and most servers don't show ads at all, preferring other paths to get the financial support they need to run, but that just means that companies that want to be seen on the Fediverse will actually have to BECOME HUMAN.

An example of social media “done right” even on the Big Silos, that will surely be familiar to my Italian followship, is Taffo, a funeral service provider that had become famous for its humorous takes in their media campaigns. I would expect that kind of activity to have excellent chances of being well received on the Fediverse.

(OT I just made the mistake of checking if followship existed in the meaning I intended above, and ended up on the Wikipedia page for followership and now I want to kill some more pundits, but for entirely different reasons.)

BTW, we're now at mark-70K, so the current average is ~10K in 6 hours, and if this holds we're at 42 hours from the mark: less than two days from now.

People have been wondering why there's been such a raise in the last couple of days after a slump that had kept onboarding below 500/hr.

There have been a few initiatives recently to do some campaigning about #Mastodon and the #TwitterMigration. March 9 was nominated for #JoinMastodonDay, and the #IdesOfMarch as #LeaveTwitterDay —and while these have generated some noise on Twitter and probably helped revamp interest on the #Fediverse, I have my doubts about the effectiveness of the latter initiative especially.

FWIW, I love the tag names chosen. #IdesOfMusk, #AprilFlight have a nice touch, and I'm sure they help with the awareness of the opportunity to look beyond Twitter or the other social silos, but even if they convince people get an account on the #Fediverse, that's really not the hard part —despite a common (mis)perception.

While the #Fediverse can still be helped by more widespread awareness and recognition (possibly beyond #Mastodon), I think a bigger issue at the moment is that not all those who join or have joined in the past have switched to it as their primary online social experience.

Ironically, this is likely due to one of the strongest selling points of most Fediverse platforms, starting from Mastodon: being designed to be interactive rather than addictive. The silos people have been corralled into, the experience they've been trained into, is one of controlled engagement no better than that of the worst TV. So they can just numb themselves in an infinite, enraging, unsatisfactory doomscrolling experience.

On the corp silos, it doesn't matter if users follow anybody: they will be served “content” anyway —by hook, or by crook, one could say. So what happens when they join Mastodon or whatever instead? They get an empty timeline where nothing happens.

Regardless of how many people claim that having to choose a server is the biggest onboarding hurdle, I maintain that that's not as important as the lack of retention —and what it stems from.

It's quite clear that despite the claimed difficulty of having to choose a server, people _do_ join the Fediverse, at reasonable rates. But do they stay? Or do they lose interest after a few days because “nothing happens”, because nothing has happened in their Home timeline, because they don't follow anyone?

I surely hope that no Fediverse platform ever switches to some kind of “doomscroll engagement” to help retention, but I believe there are possible solutions between that extremum and the “bare field” that is currently experienced by a lot of newcomers.
As an example, clients (starting from the official ones) could advise new users with an empty timeline to look around, find interesting profiles, search for hashtags, as a way to direct them towards a more fulfilling experience.

Of course, the empty timeline being a primary reason for the bouncing is just a hypothesis of mine. Someone more competent than me might want to actually run a poll to collect actual data points on people who joined and bounced, asking them why. But I suspect the actual reason won't be that different. A variant I expect would be common too is that they haven't found specific profiles they were looking for —or those profiles haven't been posting as much.

BTW, the >10K/6hr rate is holding up, and Mastodon seems to be now at less than 60K to 10M accounts:
https://mastodon.social/@mastodonusercount/110045115762229787
so the question remains: what kind of experience are these newcomers having? Will they bounce? Will they find a reason to say?

One of the interesting thing about federated and distributed protocols is that the accuracy of user counts is inevitably low. As an example of this, by the frequently-cited @mastodonusercount statistics we're now barely more than 20K users from the 10M mark, but other sources, such as
https://the-federation.info/ have been counting over 11M users for the entire Fediverse for a while now, with 10M accounts just for ActivityPub platforms —and the numbers are actually an underestimation.