Stephen Downes

There have been numerous predictions that Mastodon won't last through the end of the year but as it passes its second anniversary it continues to grow, currently sitting at 1,627,557 registered users on 3,460 servers. That's still a tiny fraction of Facebook or even Twitter users, but it's still significant. Where Mastodon has been successful has been in making the interface user-friendly. But the greatest hurdle will be to reach mainstream acceptance despite being a poor platform for celebrities and advertisers to exploit. I view this as a strength, but it's really hard to scale without these.