Social media platform numbers: how many people are using what today?

Greetings from an extremely busy day. Today the Future Trends Forum is going to explore options for academic Twitter. I’m very excited about this conversation. Where are folks going? How many are staying on Twitter, and how many WILL head to Bluesky, Mastodon, etc?

One detail I’d like to touch on is just how large each platform is, as far as we can tell. For this post I’d like to offer some quick, back of the envelope, I’m-not-a-statistician estimates for conversational purposes. I don’t have time for trends extrapolation today, just a snapshot of where social media stand on this October 2023 day.

If any reader has better numbers, please let me know in comments.

Let’s start with the leading Fediverse platform. How many people now use Mastodon? The joinmastodon.org/servers page states 1.4 million monthly active users.

We can find more data on this score. According to Eric Khun’s tracker, the number of total (not just “active”) users is over 8 million:

Those numbers come from this Mastodon API, which offers a “user_count” of 8,073,406 today, along with a “server_count” of 9,138.

What proportion of those users are active? One site considered numbers earlier this year and estimated 22%. That would mean…