Mastodon vs Bluesky in 2026: Which Has More Users? I Checked Both
Bluesky is the bigger network, and the gap in activity is wider than the gap in sign-ups. On November 4, 2026, Bluesky had about 47.4 million accounts and Mastodon had 10.5 million, about 4.5 to 1. From October 28 to November 3, Mastodon's servers reported 3.5 million new posts, boosts included. Bluesky had 24.6 million posts in the same seven days, and that's without reposts. Mastodon still does things Bluesky doesn't: you can edit posts, lock your account and pick a server whose rules you agree with.
Most pages that rank for this comparison quote user counts from 2024 or 2025, and they don't agree with each other. So I pulled current numbers for both networks for the same week. For Mastodon, I asked 1,515 servers for their own weekly activity stats and added them up. mastodon.social alone wrote 31% of all Mastodon posts that week, and the ten biggest servers wrote 45%. For Bluesky, I used Jaz's bsky-search statistics, which track the whole network, and replayed 24 hours of Bluesky's public data stream to count reposts and see where posters are hosted.
(Disclosure: I make Agent Sky, a Bluesky growth tool. More on it at the end.)
Is Bluesky or Mastodon More Popular?
Bluesky, on every measure I could find. Here's the side-by-side:
| Measure (fall 2026) | Mastodon | Bluesky |
|---|---|---|
| Registered accounts | 10.48 million on 7,222 servers (joinmastodon.org, Nov 4) | 47.39 million (Jaz's bsky-search stats, Nov 4) |
| Monthly active users | 742,450 logged in within 30 days (joinmastodon.org, Nov 4) | Not published. Similarweb estimate: 10.4 million, mobile apps only (June 2026) |
| Active in one day (Nov 3) | Not published | 1.06 million accounts liked a post, 607,000 posted (Jaz's bsky-search stats) |
| New posts in one week (Oct 28–Nov 3) | 3.54 million, boosts included (1,397 servers' own stats) | 24.6 million, reposts not included (Jaz's bsky-search stats) |
| Reposts in one day | Counted as posts in the line above | 4.66 million reposts, on top of 4.03 million posts (my replay, Nov 3–4) |
| Where posts come from | 31% from mastodon.social, 45% from the 10 biggest servers | 97% of posting accounts are hosted by Bluesky itself (my sample of 1,000) |
Here's what the table shows:
- One day on Bluesky has more active accounts than a month on Mastodon. About 1.06 million Bluesky accounts liked something on November 3. Mastodon counted 742,450 accounts that logged in at all in 30 days. A login isn't a like, so this isn't a like-for-like measure, but the gap is too big for that to change the answer.
- Bluesky has about 7 times the posts. It's 24.6 million against 3.54 million, and Mastodon's number includes boosts while Bluesky's leaves out reposts. Counted the same way, the gap is bigger: in 24 hours on November 3–4, Bluesky had 8.7 million posts and reposts, more than Mastodon had in a week. (That day was US Election Day, so it ran a little above normal, but not by enough to change this.)
- Mastodon is more centralized than it looks. mastodon.social, the server run by the Mastodon team, wrote 1.10 million of the 3.54 million posts. The next nine biggest servers added another 14%. Bluesky is more centralized still: of 1,000 random accounts that posted in my replay, 971 were hosted on Bluesky's own servers. The rest were spread across bridges and independent hosts like Eurosky and Blacksky.
Mastodon also isn't the whole fediverse. Across all ActivityPub software (Misskey, Pixelfed, Lemmy and others), FediDB counts 14.5 million accounts and 1.19 million monthly active users. That's under a third of Bluesky's accounts. Some pages quote 18 million Mastodon accounts or 1.4 million monthly actives. Those figures come from trackers that count more servers, or more kinds of fediverse software, than joinmastodon.org does. None of them change which network is bigger.
Bluesky doesn't publish its own active-user count. The most quoted outside estimate is Similarweb's 10.4 million monthly users of the mobile apps in June 2026, down 27% from a year before (via GIGAZINE). It doesn't count people who use Bluesky in a browser. (I go deeper on Bluesky's numbers in how many users Bluesky has.)
Both networks are smaller than they were. Mastodon had 1.8 million monthly actives at the end of 2022, and it stayed between 724,000 and 753,000 from October 4 to November 4, 2026. Bluesky's sign-ups peaked in late 2024.
What's the Difference Between Mastodon and Bluesky?
Mastodon is thousands of separate servers that share posts with each other. Bluesky is one shared network where most people are hosted by Bluesky the company, though anyone can run their own server. Mastodon uses the ActivityPub protocol. Bluesky uses the AT Protocol. In daily use, these are the differences you'll notice:
| Mastodon | Bluesky | |
|---|---|---|
| Signing up | Pick a server first. Its rules and moderators apply to you | One sign-up at bsky.app. Other hosts are optional |
| Home feed | Chronological. Explore and trending tabs are ranked | Chronological Following feed, plus Discover and thousands of custom feeds |
| Post length | 500 characters by default. Servers can raise it | 300 characters |
| Edit a post | Yes | No (how people work around it) |
| Lock your account or post to followers only | Yes | No (where Bluesky is on that) |
| Quote posts | Yes, since Mastodon 4.5 (November 2025), with a setting for who may quote you | Yes, and you can turn quotes off or detach yours |
| Search posts by word | Only posts from people who opted in, on servers that turn search on | All public posts |
| Direct messages | Private mentions, not end-to-end encrypted | Separate chat, not end-to-end encrypted |
| Moving to another server | Your followers move with you. Your posts don't | Your posts, followers and handle can move with you (third-party tools do this today) |
| Who pays for it | Each server's admin. The software and mastodon.social come from Mastodon's nonprofit organization, funded by donations, grants and sponsors | Bluesky Social PBC, a venture-funded company ($100M Series B, disclosed March 2026) |
Mastodon gives you more control. Bluesky makes it easier to be found. On Mastodon, you pick a server whose rules you agree with, you can edit posts, and a post you shared only with followers stays private. On Bluesky, search covers every public post, Discover and custom feeds show your posts to people who don't follow you yet, and starter packs let someone follow up to 150 accounts at once. If you're starting with no followers, that's the difference that matters most.
How Do Mastodon and Bluesky Compare to Threads?
Threads is far bigger than both. Meta said in June 2026 that Threads had passed 500 million monthly active users. Threads can also share posts with Mastodon: Threads users can turn on fediverse sharing, so Mastodon users can follow them. Bluesky isn't connected to Threads at all, except through bridges. (I compared those two in Bluesky vs Threads.)
So for size, it's Threads, then Bluesky, then Mastodon. Of the three, only Mastodon and Bluesky have an open network that no single company controls.
Can Mastodon and Bluesky Users Follow Each Other?
Yes, through a bridge called Bridgy Fed, but both accounts have to opt in. A Bluesky user opts in by following @ap.brid.gy. A Mastodon user opts in by following @bsky.brid.gy@bsky.brid.gy. After that, people on the other network can follow, reply and like across the bridge.
Few people have done it. On November 4, 2026, @ap.brid.gy had 72,519 followers on Bluesky, about 0.15% of Bluesky's accounts. Going the other way, bridged Mastodon and fediverse accounts show up on Bluesky with handles ending in .ap.brid.gy. In a random sample of 3,992 accounts that posted on Bluesky in my 24-hour replay, 37 (0.9%) were bridged fediverse accounts, most often from mastodon.social. They wrote 1.5% of the sample's posts.
So if your audience is on one network, a bridge won't bring the other one to you. You can post on both and bridge them, but with so few accounts opted in, pick one network as home.
Mastodon or Bluesky: Which Should You Join?
If you want to grow an audience, Bluesky. If you want a smaller community with rules set by the people who run your server, Mastodon.
Pick Mastodon if:
- you want to choose (or run) the server and its rules
- you need followers-only posts or a locked account today
- you want a home feed with no algorithm, and a smaller crowd is fine
Pick Bluesky if:
- you want people who don't follow you yet to find your posts
- you want search, custom feeds and starter packs to do part of the work
- you want a bigger crowd: about 7 times as many posts each week
How I measured it, and the limits. For Mastodon's accounts and monthly active users, I used joinmastodon.org's public statistics for November 4, 2026. For Mastodon's weekly posts, I listed the 3,000 largest fediverse servers by account count from FediDB's public API, kept the 1,515 running Mastodon, and asked each one for its activity stats. 1,397 answered. Together they have 631,000 monthly active users, by FediDB's count. I added up each server's last full week (about October 28 to November 3). In Mastodon's source code, that count includes every new public or unlisted post made on the server, boosts included, but not followers-only posts or direct messages. Servers that didn't answer or weren't in the top 3,000 are missing, so 3.54 million is a little low. For Bluesky's accounts, daily likers and posters, and weekly posts, I used Jaz's bsky-search statistics, a widely used tracker of the whole network. For reposts and the two samples of posting accounts, I replayed Bluesky's public Jetstream feed from 05:00 UTC November 3 to 05:00 UTC November 4, 2026. From the accounts that posted in that window, I picked 4,000 at random and looked up their handles (3,992 loaded), and picked another 1,000 and looked up which server hosts each one. That was US Election Day, so posting ran a little above normal: the tracker shows 3.71 million posts on November 3, against 3.35 to 3.61 million on each of the six days before. Comparing one day of Bluesky likes with a month of Mastodon logins isn't like for like, and some likes come from bots.
If you pick Bluesky and you're starting small, I built Agent Sky for that. It finds active accounts in your niche, follows them at a human pace, well inside Bluesky's limits, and checks for a live follow-back before it unfollows anyone. $9 a month, free to start.
Quick FAQ
Is Bluesky or Mastodon more popular? Bluesky, by a wide margin. On November 4, 2026, Bluesky had about 47.4 million accounts (Jaz's bsky-search stats) and Mastodon had 10.5 million (joinmastodon.org). The gap in activity is bigger. From October 28 to November 3, 2026, Mastodon servers reported about 3.5 million new posts, boosts included, while Bluesky had about 24.6 million posts without counting reposts.
How many active users does Mastodon have compared to Bluesky? Mastodon had 742,450 monthly active users on November 4, 2026, per joinmastodon.org, which counts accounts that logged in during the past 30 days. Bluesky doesn't publish an active-user number. Similarweb estimated 10.4 million monthly users of Bluesky's mobile apps in June 2026. On a single day, November 3, 2026, about 1.06 million Bluesky accounts liked at least one post, per Jaz's bsky-search stats. That's more than a month of Mastodon logins.
What is the difference between Mastodon and Bluesky? Mastodon is thousands of independent servers that share posts using the ActivityPub protocol. You pick a server when you sign up, and your home feed is chronological. Bluesky uses the AT Protocol. It's one shared network where most people are hosted by Bluesky itself, with a chronological Following feed plus Discover and custom feeds. Mastodon has editing and followers-only posts. Bluesky has neither yet.
Is Bluesky part of Mastodon? No. Bluesky and Mastodon are separate networks built on different protocols: the AT Protocol and ActivityPub. They only connect through Bridgy Fed, an opt-in bridge that about 72,500 Bluesky accounts had joined by November 4, 2026.
Can Mastodon users follow Bluesky users? Yes, through Bridgy Fed, but both accounts have to opt in. A Bluesky user opts in by following @ap.brid.gy, which had about 72,500 followers on November 4, 2026. A Mastodon user opts in by following @bsky.brid.gy@bsky.brid.gy. Bridged fediverse accounts appear on Bluesky with a handle ending in .ap.brid.gy.