Why this page exists, and a caveat up front¶

Every number below gets stale fast, and tracking methodology differs between sources (registered accounts, monthly actives, daily actives, and web-traffic estimates are all measuring different things). Treat this as a snapshot of relative scale and trend direction as of early 2026, not a precise, citable figure for any single date — and recheck before quoting any of this externally.

The one pattern worth internalizing before the numbers themselves: registered accounts dramatically overstate real usage on every network here, often by a factor of five to ten. A registration is nearly free (one sign-up flow); staying active is not. That gap is the single most important thing to control for when comparing platforms, since the networks with the loudest registration-count headlines aren't necessarily the ones with the most people actually posting.

The numbers, as of early 2026¶

Reading these numbers correctly¶

• Bluesky has overtaken Mastodon in real, active usage, not just registrations, since opening to public signup — a reversal from the fediverse's earlier years when Mastodon was clearly the larger of the two by any measure.
• Threads' 400M+ figure is for the whole app, the vast majority of which has nothing to do with the fediverse at all — see [[threads]] for why only a small, opt-in slice of that user base is ActivityPub-reachable, and why comparing it directly to Mastodon's active-user count would be comparing a centralized platform's total audience to a decentralized network's actual federated participation.
• Mainstream reach for all of these remains small relative to incumbent centralized platforms — Pew's 4%/8%/21% US-adult figures for Bluesky/Threads/X put the scale gap in plain terms, even while each decentralized network's own trajectory has been one of steady, real growth rather than stagnation.
• "20 billion public records" is a records count, not a user count — it reflects atproto's design (every post, like, and follow is its own addressable record) and the growing number of non-Bluesky apps writing to the same network, which is a genuinely different kind of growth signal than active-user counts capture.

Further reading¶

• FediDB — live cross-network fediverse tracking
• Bluesky and the Fediverse Statistics (2026) — the aggregated source for most figures above
• Pew Research Center — social media use — US adult platform-usage surveys
• See also: [[mastodon]], [[bluesky]], [[threads]] — the individual app pages these numbers describe