Mastodon Recap 2021

Disclaimer: Since Mastodon is decentralized, different Mastodon servers have a different view of the network depending on user activity, and providing an objective data summary across the entire network is not currently possible. Data provided in this blog post is provided as-seen-from mastodon.social, the oldest and one of the more well connected servers, but it is nevertheless biased towards mastodon.social’s demographic and may not represent other parts of the fediverse accurately.

Most shared posts of 2021

• “I have encountered more image descriptions on Mastodon […]” (607 reblogs)

• "🌐 NeoDB 联邦宇宙书影音站 🌐 正式开张了！" (547 reblogs)

• “Delete Chrome. Now.” (572 reblogs)

• “SCI-HUB NEEDS YOUR HELP!” (546 reblogs)

• "#Tusky has been removed from the PlayStore by Google" (455 reblogs)

Most shared pictures of 2021

• “God I love The Register’s headline writers” (236 reblogs)

• “The moment when love is first confessed” (243 reblogs)

• "[…] #Google keeps records of everything you buy […]" (344 reblogs)

• “Irony” (253 reblogs)

• “Do not buy NFT made with my art” (441 reblogs)

• “I […] turned [lion NFTs] into a mosaic of a person right-clicking” (393 reblogs)

Most liked posts of 2021

• “Not on social media?” (559 favourites)

• “Police are warning students […] not to access Sci-Hub […]” (559 favourites)

• “The official #Mastodon app for iOS is now on the App Store!” (448 favourites)

• "[…] Mastodon gGmbH […]" (396 favourites)

• “If your cat often […] walks all over your keyboard […]” (362 favourites)

Most intensive polls of 2021

• “What’s your primary OS?” (4,382 votes)

• “Do you use any Mozilla products?” (2,280 votes)

• “Do you use an RSS/Atom reader?” (2,031 votes)

• “Let’s make a colour together!” (1,918 votes)

• “THE ULTIMATE BATTLE” (1,772 votes)

Top hashtags in 2021

• #bot (490,196 posts)
• #news (391,880 posts)
• #nsfw (102,157 posts)
• #india (99,350 posts)
• #nowplaying (71,498 posts)
• #abyss_fun (67,213 posts)
• #bitcoin (55,863 posts)
• #linux (54,522 posts)
• #google (54,079 posts)
• #russia (49,598 posts)

Other numbers

Disclaimer: We collect aggregate statistics by crawling fediverse servers that identify themselves as running Mastodon. We may not be aware of all Mastodon servers, and aggregate statistics can be disabled for some servers. Temporary service outages across different servers may lead to day-to-day disparities between collected numbers.

• 2,749,065 total users (+930,724 since January)
• 244,634 active users (+814 since January)
• 2,551 active Mastodon servers

As for the mastodon.social server, here are some of our numbers for 2021:

• 65,052 new sign-ups
• 17,951 active users
• 3,904 moderation reports handled