Revisiting Mastodon three months (and many angry @jack tweets) later:

• I was able to identify 3,786 public Mastodon instances. (Up 44% since May.)
• Across these, there appear to be 1.4M registered accounts. (Up 14%.)
• In the last week, there were 109K accounts that actively published content. (Flat.)
• The majority of the network’s activity is still concentrated in the top 5 instances, although the top instances have shuffled around a bit.
• The entire network reports slightly over 154 million “toots” across Mastodon’s entire history. That’s 33M new “toots” in the past few months, or a 10% uptick in monthly post volume over the past quarter. Mastodon is not a rocket ship but it certainly shows signs of life.

It’s not clear to me what’s driving the growth in instances: my assumption was that disaffected Twitter users would flock to well-known servers (like mastodon.social and mastodon.xyz) but it appears that self-hosting is becoming increasingly common. Perhaps this says something about the kind of Twitter user that considers Mastodon a viable alternative?